


Ficlets from Tumblr

by TurtleTotem



Series: Tumblr Ficlets [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: (Candy shop is close enough right?), Alpha/Omega, Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Animals, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Sailor Moon, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Angels, Blind Date, CPR, Character Death, Chubby Charles, Established Relationship, F/M, Fighter Pilots, First Kiss, Fluff, Friends With Benefits, Games, Gay Mutant Road Trip, Gen, Hospitals, Jealousy, M/M, Magneto's Silly Costume, Miscarriage, Missing Persons, Missing Scene, Mistaken Identity, Mpreg, Nephilim, Pets, Rockstar AU, Sad, Step-Sibling Incest, post-beach reconciliation, write ALL the AUs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-19
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2017-11-12 11:58:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 61
Words: 27,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/490685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TurtleTotem/pseuds/TurtleTotem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The little off-the-cuff things I sometimes write on Tumblr, collected together. Mostly Cherik but with a few other things thrown in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Photography

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Драбблы с тумблера](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2149599) by [krasnoe_solnishko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/krasnoe_solnishko/pseuds/krasnoe_solnishko)



> Written for [this](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/29666824322/pearlo-codenamecesare-dont-move-ive#notes) picture prompt.

Erik has had other muses in the course of his photography career, other people who caught his eye and held it, every angle of their face a fascination, every shadow on their skin a gift from the light. Each of them enjoyed the attention at first, blushed and posed and smiled for the camera. Then, sooner or later, they tired of it, batted the lens away with real irritation, hid their faces. They never understood how much that hurt him, as if they had slapped away a kiss.

Charles… Charles is different. He doesn’t blush or pose, never has. He might arch an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth curling briefly. For the most part, he just keeps doing whatever he was doing — explaining mitochondrial disorders or folding the laundry, grading papers with a ruthless scowl or coaxing warm milk into a waterlogged kitten.

Or lying next to him in bed, sleep-mussed and gorgeous in the dawn light, arguing fiercely about ethics and humanism with half-lidded eyes, and he doesn’t flinch for an instant when Erik reaches for the camera. As usual, it’s like he doesn’t even see the camera.

He’s only looking at Erik.


	2. Gifts for Family

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by [this](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/28736638762/i-dont-know-whether-to-call-this-fic-or-meta-or#notes) confession about Cain Marko.

Charles treats Cain with a wary sort of compassion and pity, determined not to hate him, both for the sake of the boy whose father slammed him into walls, and for the sake of his own idea of himself, his own principles. He can forgive Erik all the blood on his hands, when he probably shouldn’t; surely he can forgive another broken little boy for the memory of bruises.

Raven, on the other hand, hates Cain with a violence she makes no attempt to hide or control, has always hated him all the more for the wrongs he did Charles that Charles forgave so easily. She finds that her hatred of Cain outlives even her affection for Charles — or is, perhaps, the last remaining expression of her affection for Charles. She can’t love or forgive Cain, not even for Charles, least of all for Charles — but she can hurt, reject and hate him for Charles, and make him a gift of sorts out of all the things he would never want her to do.


	3. Oath of Service

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for the prompt [Medieval AU](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/27100175670/erik-charles-medieval-au#notes). (Slightly edited.)

Prince Charles was a constant voice for peace and justice, doing all he could to mitigate his stepfather’s damage and help his people survive, and Sir Erik loved him for that, though he knew the prince’s beloved peace would never exist.

It was not until the inevitable war came to pass, and Charles fought beside them in the mud, never too exhausted to offer a smile or a comforting touch, or let a peasant soldier crush his hand while the doctor sawed through his leg, that he realized it was more than the devotion of a knight to his lord.

And it was not until the day he knelt before Charles as his new king, and swore his life to Charles’s service without reservation — hoping, really, that when he died it would be for Charles — it was not until he pressed the ritual kiss to Charles's hand, and the hand trembled and brushed his face in the briefest caress, that he realized his lord not only saw his love but returned it.


	4. Family Resemblance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for the prompt [Loki/Darcy - raising baby Sleipnir](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/27165547694/loki-darcy-raising-baby-sleipnir-p#notes).

Darcy was never one of those look-at-the-cute-baby kinda girls, she mostly wanted to avoid the cute baby’s fluids and go on with her life, but holy crap she has a stepson now and that can’t be ignored (at not least not without Social Services getting involved).

It would be one thing, she tells herself, watching Sleipnir gallop through the kitchen and chew on the houseplants, if the stepson in question were remotely humanoid in appearance, but how is she supposed to have warm maternal feelings toward what looks more like the unholy offspring of a horse and a brown recluse than anything her husband could have produced?

But she looks after him and gives him food and all, and when he curls up in her lap (entirely without consulting her first) with half his feet tucked neatly under his body and the others sprawling every which way, and just lays there all warm and soft with a weirdly comforting heartbeat and looks up at her all trusting and sleepy, she can’t help noticing that he has Loki’s eyes.


	5. Preggo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for the prompt [Rhodey/Tony as the characters from Juno](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/27098212937/rhodey-tony-as-the-characters-from-juno#notes).

Like a one-night stand with his best friend isn’t awkward enough, Tony has to go and get himself knocked up, which is really not even remotely in the ten-year plan Obadiah had made him draw up and really couldn’t be happening at all, and what the heck kind of parent is Tony Stark ever going to be? So Tony makes the very mature decision, he thinks, to make it un-happen as quickly as possible and without telling anyone at all EVER.

This lasts until he gets to the clinic and opens his wallet to show ID and there’s the picture of Rhodey in his ROTC uniform looking exasperated and beautiful, and Tony figures yeah, this baby is half Stark and that’s doomed to disaster, but it’s also half Rhodey and that alone makes it deserve to be born.


	6. Turtle Solidarity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for the [prompt](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/27097322685/pairing-charles-erik-au-everyone-is-a-turtle-or#notes) "Charles/Erik AU: Everyone is a turtle (or, one of them is like Lonesome George)."

The zoo staff say Erik is the only one of his kind, a mutant tortoise whose gleaming metallic shell is unique, a thing of wonder. Erik is proud to be different from other tortoises, even if it means he is all alone in a zoo enclosure whose every inch he has long since memorized.

Until the day the zoo staff bring in another mutant tortoise, this one with brilliant blue eyes and a large X marking on his shell, who rubs his head against Erik’s and says, “You’re not alone anymore.”


	7. Nourishment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by a [comment](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/26681535803/groovyphilia-turtletotem-borednawkward#notes) about Erik's tiny waist and Charles worrying about him eating enough.

From the first hour of their acquaintance, Charles is trying to feed him.

On the Coast Guard cutter he bullies him into drinking tea, insists it’ll help him stop shivering. It does.

In the CIA facility’s cafeteria, he sneaks extra desserts and drops them on Erik’s plate. He gets his feelings hurt if Erik doesn’t eat them.

”You’re too thin,” Charles says, over and over, impatiently, as if this is a personal failing on Erik’s part. He frequently looks at Erik’s waist in what seems to be mingled jealousy, worry, and awe. Once, just once, when he’s gotten rather tipsy, Charles tests to see if he can encircle Erik’s entire waist in his hands. He can’t, but the attempt leaves Erik feeling off-kilter and overwarm, though he hasn’t had a drop to drink.

As they travel the country, stopping at greasy spoons and family restaurants, half of Charles’s servings end up in Erik’s mouth. Until this point, it’s been easier to just chew and swallow, but now Erik begins to fight him. He feels like a pet Charles is determined to pamper. He’s beginning to have strange dreams about waking up to find he’s grown too fat to move.

But every time he protests the extra baked potato or helping of peas that’s landed on his plate, Charles’s eyes get big and worried, and every time Erik caves and eats just one more bite, Charles’s face lights up like he’s granted him a favor. So, despite all his intentions to the contrary, Erik eats.

Their first night at the mansion, when Darwin has been dead less than 24 hours, Charles knocks on Erik’s door and comes in with a plate of cucumber sandwiches in precise crust-less squares.

“Charles, really,” he says, but the protest dies on his lips when he sees how red Charles’s eyes are.

“I was supposed to take care of them,” he says. “I can’t protect them, Erik, I act like I can but I can’t, I can’t teach them, I can’t even keep you from starving to death in front of my eyes, what am I supposed to do?”

Erik eats the entire plate of sandwiches. By the last one, Charles is sitting on his lap feeding him by hand. It’s the first night, but far from the last, that Charles doesn’t sleep in his own room.

After the beach, Erik goes for four days without eating. Finally Raven, without ever meeting his eyes, brings him a cucumber sandwich. It’s soggy and lukewarm and the bread is a little stale. He can hardly bear to look at it. But he eats every crumb, hoping it’s what Charles would want him to do.


	8. Shoes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Dropped in a friend's askbox.](http://borednawkward.tumblr.com/post/23312986142/one-of-the-last-things-they-do-before-heading-back-to)

One of the last things they do, before heading back to the CIA to train the recruits they've gathered, is buy Charles a pair of shoes. On Erik's dime, Charles insists, since he was the one in such a hurry to get Charles out of his clothes in the backseat that they somehow lost a shoe out the window.

Erik rolled his eyes and cursed and grumbled, but he shelled out for the shoes. Charles tried on pair after pair, and Erik helped him take them on and off, as an excuse to feel up his ankles and calves in front of the entire store. Finally, when Charles failed to make a decision, Erik picked a pair at random and said, “These are the ones I’m paying for. Wear them or have fun hopping on one foot.”

Charles wore those shoes for thirty-two years. It wasn’t hard; shoes don’t wear out very fast when you’re not actually walking anywhere.


	9. Beautiful Soul, Pt. 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for [Zimothy's prompt and giftset](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/19046351234/zimothy-charles-lived-his-entire-life-happily) for nephilim!Charles.

“You’re watching me sleep again. I thought we talked about this.”

“You have such a beautiful soul.”

“Right. I bet you say that to all the girls. Also, creepy, remember we talked about creepy?”

“I’m supposed to protect you, Charles. You get into enough trouble when you’re awake, but when you sleep you’re so… so completely defenseless.” For a moment Charles thinks Erik’s going to touch him, but he doesn’t. Come to think of it, Erik’s never actually touched him. “You can’t expect me to leave you alone like that, as tasty as you are to the local nightlife.”

Charles sighs, thinking about the demon from geometry class last week, and how close it came to munching them both because Charles made Erik wait outside the classroom. That bite wound on Erik’s shoulder is probably going to scar. _Should probably change the bandages again, he won’t think about it until he has a raging infection._ “All right, you may have a point about the nightlife.”

“Of course I have a point. You will learn, little nephilim, that I am always right. And that I will always protect you. Now get up! We have a lot of training to do.”

“Training. From the man who flunked Angel school.”

“I didn’t flunk, I was kicked out,” Erik says serenely. “Fortunately for you, or I wouldn’t have found you in time. Now get up. If you’re quick, you might have time for some breakfast before I start attacking you.”

Charles whimpers and burrows back under the covers.


	10. Beautiful Soul, Pt. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prequel to nephilim!Charles, accompanying giftset [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/19440621217/nephilim-charles-continues#notes).

Erik has been back in the mortal world for three weeks now, and it sucks just as bad as he remembered.

Well, all right, that’s unfair. He’s not being kept behind razor wire this time, casually beaten or systematically starved. No one’s inking a number into his arm. But it still sucks. It’s dirty, and loud, and everything is _off_ , so many rough surfaces and imperfect angles and discordant colors.

And the _people._ Grimy, smelly, scowling, squabbling, jostling him on every side. Erik had thought the condescending serenity of the higher angels obnoxious; he realizes now that he’d had no concept of the term. Obnoxious at _best;_ the acts of thoughtless cruelty he’d seen on just his first day had left him breathless. Dogs and beggars kicked on the sidewalk, women molested on the train, children left to cry themselves to sleep in their carry-baskets while their mothers gazed slack-jawed into little glowing screens.

And heaven forbid anyone _else_ try to soothe the child. _That_ at last provoked action from the mother; shouting and hitting, and Erik being ejected from the train station by security.

Humans are terrible, and Erik is left wondering why the Almighty Father ever created them at all.

More immediately relevant, he wonders what madness had seized Francesca, to go rogue and marry a mortal. If she had, as rumor insisted, borne a nephilim child and hidden him away, to grow up _here,_ his opinion of her can only suffer for it.

A child exists, that much he knows, a son of Francesca’s mortal husband. Tracking the boy down has been an unexpected hardship, with the mortal husband long dead, and most records kept on _computers,_ an invention Erik is certain was spurred by the Dark One. But three weeks of effort has at last brought him to this university town in New York, and this den of iniquity owned by the possible-nephilim’s stepsister.

 _NEVERMORE,_ the brightly blinking sign proclaims, accompanied by a stylized raven. There are blue and purple lights and the odors of strong drink and sweat. Erik sneers as he steps inside. Surely he will find no nephilim _here._

But he does.

On a raised platform at one end of the room, a spotlight gilding his hair, a boy sits at a piano and sings. Erik has seen such things before, in similar establishments, and usually the performer is lucky to have three or four ears turned his way, the rest of the room caught up in the commission of their own sins. Not here. Here, the entire room is rapt, and rightly so, because he sings like…

Well. An angel.

The song is soft and haunting — Erik catches something about baling wire and underwater pearls, he doesn’t understand the symbolism but he understands the aching regret in the song. The boy’s voice fills the room with it, makes it beautiful, makes it alive. And his _face,_ eyes closed, completely absorbed in the beauty of the music… Erik can’t look away from his face. Tears blur his vision, and it’s all Erik can do not to go to him, touch him, warm his hands against the bit of grace glowing in this ugly corner of mortality.

The song ends, and the boy opens his eyes.

That settles the question, if there were any doubt. The same gentle, brilliant blue eyes that had come to claim him, so many years ago, and carry him away from the reek and horror of the camps. Francesca’s eyes.

Erik has found his nephilim.


	11. Albert

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Complete nonsense generated by [this gif and info]() about tardigrades, aka water bears, adorable microscopic creatures that can survive almost anything.

and little Charles

begging his mother to buy him a pet water bear

which she thinks he made up and tells him to go away

so he spends days in the woods taking moss samples

and peering at them under the microscope

UNTIL HE FINDS ONE

HE NAMES IT ALBERT

AND HE STILL HAS IT IN ITS OWN LITTLE ROOM AT THE MANSION

he introduces it to Erik

who looks at him like he’s completely insane

then Charles makes him look at Albert under the microscope

AND ERIK’S MENTAL ‘D’AWWW’ IS _SO LOUD_

AND HE THINKS HE MIGHT DIE OF EMBARRASSMENT

BUT CHARLES IS NEARLY IN TEARS OF JOY

BECAUSE FINALLY SOMEONE UNDERSTANDS


	12. Magneto's Defeat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nonsense inspired by [this gif](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/17309831523/azryal00-ninemoons42-helens78) of Fassy fighting with his tie. Set, I guess, in some kind of reconciliation! or no-divorce! AU.

“Come here, Charles. Help me with this thing.”

“No, no, I’m having far too much fun watching the show.”

“How fun will it be when I accidentally hang myself with this stupid — Stop laughing, Charles!”

“Master of Magnetism. Supreme Ruler of Genosha. God-Emperor of Dune or whatever else you’re calling yourself these days.”

“Shut up.”

“Defeated by neckwear.”

“Get off the floor. You shouldn’t have had that fourth martini.”

“Says the man who is too drunk to undress himself. I think you actually tightened it that time.”

“Who invented these little monsters anyway? Who decided it was a good idea for men to walk around with these handle-noose-things around their necks? The combat liability—”

“Mmm. That reminds me, I _can_ think of _one_ good use for them.”

*grabs Erik by the tie and drags him to bed*


	13. Photography, Pt. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based on [this photoset](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/29875950317/pearlo-ninemoons42-fassyfaceavoythere) and its comments, sequel to Ch. 1 of this collection.

Erik worries, at first, about Charles’s sudden desire to try photography for himself. His apparent obliviousness to the constant presence of a lens in his life is, after all, one of the best things about him. Really, the last thing he wants is put another photographer in the house. Just because they’re married now, does Charles feel a need to do things just because Erik does them? Can’t he just leave well enough alone?

But it’s not like Erik’s going to say any of that, certainly not on their honeymoon. He just pulls out one of his simpler, sturdier cameras and lets Charles loose on Venice with a roll of film and a crash-course on F-stops.

And it’s beautiful, it’s glorious, because Charles looks through the lens with all the whimsy and fascination of a child looking through a kaleidoscope, and when a pair of pigeons decides Charles and the camera are their new toys, is far more interested in having a good conversation with them than in getting a decent shot. It’s a surreally ‘meta’ feeling for Erik, taking pictures of Charles taking pictures, but between the delicate feathers and the shape of his hands on the camera, the purity of his smile in the shadowless afternoon light, Erik thinks he’s capturing something about Charles that he’s never quite seen in focus before.

He knows this is how he’ll remember their honeymoon — Charles looking at the world through Erik’s lens, and without even taking any decent pictures, still seeing things to wonder and smile at that Erik would never have seen.


	14. Hold On Tight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tiny snippet based on [this](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/31404935587/in-the-years-to-come-it-is-the-crashing-blackbird) moment of the movie.

In the years to come, it is the crashing Blackbird that Erik will remember most, will dream of relentlessly – the hot terror of realizing Charles would die if Erik couldn’t save him, the way it felt to have Charles’s body trapped and sheltered beneath his own, the pressure of Charles’s fingers around his wrist. The sharp, shocking flash of emotion from Charles at the moment of contact, trust and relief and safeprotectedloved. If it is not the best moment of Erik’s life, it is at least the moment in Erik’s life when he was at his best, and even the long years of violence and sorrow and separation are not merciful enough to cloud the memory.


	15. Game Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As prompted by Rohnoc [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/36934034418/game-night-charles-erik).

Game night is Raven’s idea, of course. She spouts a lot of stuff about team bonding and strategic education; Erik’s pretty sure she just wants to watch everybody contort themselves into unnatural states on the Twister mat.

“Left hand green!” she calls cheerfully, and the usual hubbub of groans and chuckles starts up, people grunting and shifting and knocking each other’s elbows.

Alex has already gotten “out,” the better to heckle from the sidelines; Hank has proven surprisingly adept, and has twice accused Sean of tickling him, trying to make him fall over. Erik is increasingly uncertain how in heaven’s name he ended up participating in this farce. Especially since Charles, too, is still in the game.

In fact, Charles is currently all-but-entirely underneath him, one knee pressed to Erik’s side, his chest brushing Erik’s shoulder when he laughs. He’s laughing a lot, and all the careful tiny-thoughts meditation Erik’s been doing are going to be totally wasted if his body gets any more interested in the situation.

“Right hand red!” Raven shouts. Erik takes a deep breath and lunges for the nearest red circle.

His hand and Charles’s hit it at the same moment, which is against the rules, one of them’s going to have to change position. Raven hasn’t noticed yet, though; she’s too busy laughing at Sean, who finally belly-flopped out of the game. No one sees that they’re sharing a circle.

No one sees that Charles laces their fingers together, and arches his back just the tiniest bit, so that their faces are hardly an inch apart, and raises an eyebrow coyly.

But everyone sees what happens after that, and Raven declares an end to the just-beginning Game Night tradition, so that she will never, ever, ever again have to see anyone snogging her brother on a Twister mat.


	16. Introductions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Prompted by[xshiromorix](xshiromorix.tumblr.com):** Charles and Erik on the boat, immediately after coming out of the ocean: Erik meeting Charles, Raven, and Moira for the first time. What does he think of them? What do they think of him? How does Charles convince him to stay on?

Charles Xavier would not stop talking.

He was, at least, talking out loud now, which was much less unsettling than the sourceless, inescapable voice in his head. But talking he certainly was, enthusiastic declarations about nucleotides, Gregor Mendel, the CIA, and hypothermia spilling endlessly from the man as they were shepherded into the cutter's tiny galley to be given blankets and bad coffee. The chatter was irritating – everything about the man was irritating – what right did he have to interfere with Erik's affairs?

And yet Erik could not look away from him, this man who looked like a drowned kitten but had spoken to him with the power of a lion, a prince on the battlefield, a burning bush. His mere existence upended Erik's life. 

_You have your tricks, I have mine. I'm like you. You're not alone._

Erik was never less than 100% aware of his surroundings, or he'd have been dead long before, so he knew there were other people on the boat – knew their locations, their weapons, had a peripheral bead on their body language. But he was startled to realize he hadn't given any of them any actual _thought_ until Xavier began introducing them.

First, MacTaggert, the CIA agent. Erik imagined they were regarding each other with very similar expressions of stony suspicion, each looking for signs of the other's competence, and rather unhappy to find them. A lady CIA agent – he couldn't afford to underestimate someone who overcame that kind of disadvantage. Interestingly, MacTaggert's first apparent instinct was to get herself between him and Xavier.

Even more interestingly, _Erik's_ first instinct was not to let her.

Xavier interrupted the dance by introducing a second person as his sister, Raven. Raven, on first glance, was blonde and pretty and useless – and rather taken with Erik, from the way she kept staring at his wetsuit. Erik made a note of that as potentially useful, but had already turned the bulk of his attention back to Charles – Xavier, back to _Xavier_ – when the man said, "Show him what you can do, Raven."

And the unexceptional blonde was replaced by a gorgeous creature of jewel-like color and glowing eyes. Erik barely restrained himself from reaching out to touch.

"Raven is a mutant, like you and I," Charles said, his voice low and earnest, sounding somehow as if they were the only people in the room. "Years ago, I decided that made her my sister." _And you, Erik,_ he added silently, that strange and compelling presence in his head, _will you be our brother?_

A brotherhood of mutants. The idea pulled at him like the tide, like hunger, like nothing he could ever remember – except perhaps his revenge against Shaw. Nothing, nothing could be allowed to interfere with that.

Nevertheless, he took the startlingly warm hand Xavier extended, and couldn't help returning the smile a little when the man's face lit up like a sunrise. Maybe, when Shaw was dead, when all this was over – he might have a brother, a family, he could be with people like himself.

Maybe, he thought, Charles's brilliant gaze burning into his, there was some kind of hope for him after all.


	17. Friends With Benefits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik finds out through Tony's trolling that Charles and Tony used to be friends with rather frequent benefits.
> 
> Prompted by Synekdokee [on Tumblr.](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/49637802829/cherik-erik-finds-out-through-tonys-trolling-that)

Tony flirted with everything that moved and most things that didn’t. Charles was no exception. Though Erik found the man’s behavior grating, part of being in a relationship was learning to put up with the other party’s idiot friends — or so he’d been informed, at great length. So Erik didn’t punch Stark through a wall when, after a few too many, he started teasing Charles about the things he could do to him in bed.

Until he mentioned the birthmark on Charles’s hip.

Only much later, when Tony’s other idiot friends had hustled him away with a bag of ice to his nose, the broken table had been gathered into a corner, and Charles was doctoring Erik’s bleeding knuckles in the bathroom while scolding like a wet hen, did Erik get a chance to actually ask about it. His version of asking, of course, being a grim-yet-pleading glare that simply waited for Charles to break.

“All right, yes, Tony and I had sort of an arrangement — Pepper had dumped him again at the time, you weren’t on the scene yet, and I didn’t tell you because it was _nothing_ , Erik, it was a way to burn energy in between other people and there was _no_ reason for you to react so violently, I’m not some maiden whose honor needs defending! And don’t look at me like someone kicked your puppy, you know I have a history and I know _you_ have a history and there’s no point being childish about it.” He frowned, examining Erik’s expression. “You’ve shaken hands with Gabi and Lilandra and even Hank without batting an eye, so what makes Tony any different?”

“Well, he’s… Stark. He’s obnoxious and ridiculous and pretty continuously offensive. I just thought you had better taste than that.” But his mind was blaring an old tabloid headline, _Old Flame Speaks Out About Legendary Lover Tony Stark: “I’m Ruined For Other Men.”_

Charles chuckled, his face softening, and leaned forward to touch his forehead to Erik’s. _I chose you with approximately 0.2 seconds’ consideration, and I’d do it again,_ he replied. _Even when you’re an idiot._

Erik smiled and moved in for a kiss; Charles stepped back and smacked his hand, right on the barked knuckles.

“Go fix our poor table,” he said. “Then come find me.” He winked over his shoulder and left the room.


	18. Love is (Color)blind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles tries to tactfully tell Erik how silly his new Magneto costume looks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompted by Gyobaku [on Tumblr.](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/49639586756/three-paragraph-prompt-2%0Agyobaku)

Their rekindled relationship is still fragile, every argument bringing the scents of saltwater and smoke, threatening to reopen old wounds, and it doesn’t seem worth bringing up. If it’s hard for Charles to take Erik seriously when he’s wearing that red-and-purple disaster, well, it’s not like it actually impairs his ability to do his job with terrifying efficiency. There are so many more important things. Charles thinks surely he’ll get used to the costume.

He doesn’t. Months pass. They develop a working rhythm in the field, an even better one in more private settings, and while arguments still come fast and thick, they’ve survived enough of them not to be so frightened that every disagreement will be the end. Charles starts dropping hints. 

“I’m not sure purple provides enough contrast to give the red its full effect.”

“You cut such an impressive figure in that tuxedo, darling. We should think about altering your battle suit that way.”

“Hank and I were just discussing the possible dangers of capes in battle situations, would you like to weigh in on that?”

It doesn’t help. If Erik perceives any criticism of his costume, he shrugs it off easily.

Until the day, in the midst of an “intervention” that unfortunately involves some destruction of property, they hear Magneto described on the police scanner as “some colorblind clown in a cape, you can’t miss him, unfortunately.”

No one says a word to Erik. But the next time they deploy, he’s in an all-new suit of black and silver, the black cape reduced to half-length. He looks amazing. Charles takes care to impress upon him later, at length, how very pleased he is with the change.


	19. Empty Spaces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik disappears and Charles falls apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Modern powered 'verse. Prompt by anthonyofawesome [on Tumblr.](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/49644329658/three-paragraph-prompt-3)

The police didn’t want to hear about it when an adult mutant with a criminal record went missing. The police he spoke said things like “no indication of foul play” and “not much we can do” but their thoughts were things like “your boyfriend left you, get over it” and “good riddance to the rabblerouser anyway.”

During the day, everything money and obnoxious persistence (and, increasingly, ethically dubious telepathic influence) could do was brought to bear on the search. At night, Charles stretched his telepathy beyond any limits he’d previously dreamed, searching for Erik hour after hour. _Can you hear me? I know you’re out there. Please. Please. Come home._

He’d last been seen at an activist meeting about the rumored kidnappings of mutant children for experimentation in West Africa. According to Ororo, Erik had lingered behind to talk to a man she didn’t recognize. They’d had no luck identifying him.

_You have to be out there. Please come home._

Those first frantic days slipped through Charles’s fingers, became weeks of stretched agony. The university became less patient about his distraction and absences. After a particularly disastrous staff meeting, Charles threw his staff badge at the department head’s face and told him to consider that his resignation.

“When was the last time you ate?” Raven demanded. “When was the last time you shaved? I’m worried about Erik too but you can’t let this destroy your life!”

“What life?” was Charles’s only reply. After two weeks of ignoring her calls and even her knocks on the door, Raven stopped trying except to leave the occasional message on his voicemail.

At the end of six months, Charles had run through most of his once-considerable liquid assets, chasing false leads, greasing palms, even bribing his way into a CIA facility to use an experimental telepathy-enhancing machine, which put him in the hospital with burst blood vessels in his nose and eyes and a migraine that nearly sent him catatonic.

The day they were going to release him, a nurse absently turned on the television in Charles’s hospital room. A live report was running, about an American citizen being among those rescued from a West African mutant-slavery ring — rather, that he had rescued himself, commandeering an aircraft and getting himself and thirteen mutant children to the American embassy in Egypt.

Erik jolted visibly onscreen at the touch of Charles’s mind, turning wildly around as if toward a voice. Between distance, the lingering effects of the machine, and the haze of anti-psionic drugs the kidnappers had given all their captives, Charles could communicate only a burst of overwhelming relief and joy, _I see you I see you I see you!_

He couldn’t maintain the contact, but it didn’t matter; Erik was looking into the reporter’s camera now, shouting Charles’s name, while Charles sat on his hospital bed, weeping uncontrollably with the end of six months’ torture.


	20. The Candy Man Can

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles owns the confectionary across the street from the museum where Erik works. An AU as sweet and fluffy as cotton candy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompted by gekkythehalloweenqueen [on Tumblr.](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/49832400862/cherik-au-charles-is-the-head-worker-at-a-local-candy)

Erik Lehnsherr cared about three things in life; preserving the history of his people, keeping Alex Summers out of his parking space, and getting his daily sea-salt caramel, raspberry truffle, or double-fudge white-chocolate-chip brownie from First Class Confections, across the street from the museum. What some people felt for coffee, cigarettes, oxygen, or the milk of human kindness, Erik felt for sweets.

His coworkers would have said the only sweet thing about Erik Lehnsherr was the sight of his back as he left a room, but one person, at least, was always glad to see him; the bright-eyed, floppy-haired proprietor of First Class Confections, Charles Xavier. He greeted everyone with a smile, but Erik thought – treasured the hope, very quietly – that his smile on seeing Erik every afternoon was brighter, happier, more sincere. He was always ready to tease Erik about his grim expression or recommend some new treat for him to try, letting their fingers brush when he handed it over. Erik more often blushed and grumbled than spoke in reply, but he hung on Charles’s every word.

One day Erik walked into the shop, and found a stranger behind the counter, a young blonde woman who smiled broadly at the sight of Erik, as if he reminded her of a joke.

“Where’s Charles?” Erik demanded, his mind spinning with sudden dread – what if Charles had quit, sold the shop, _died—_

“I’m right here, Erik!” came a cheerful chirp at his elbow, and Erik turned to see Charles, for the first time not wearing his white uniform, but corduroy pants and a blue cardigan. “I’m taking a late lunch break today, I was just heading out.”

“Oh.” Erik tried to hide the way his heart sank.

“Of course Raven can still fetch whatever you’d like to order today. Or.”

“…Or?”

Charles bit his lip nervously, and Erik half-consciously mirrored the movement, holding his breath. “Or you could. You know. Come along with me. For lunch.”

Erik was due back at the museum in fifteen minutes. “I’d love to.”

“We might even get to come back here for dessert,” Charles grinned, and winked as he led Erik out the door. “I have a new recipe I’d love for you to try.”


	21. ICU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik gets into an accident that sends him the ICU.
> 
> Prompted by willgrahamslam. On Tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/62034167096/fic-war-entry-1).

Since he was paralyzed everyone has worried and fussed and stressed and built their lives around Charles’s health. Charles knows Erik has nightmares about how close they came to losing him, how easily he still could — infection, pneumonia, careless drivers who don’t look for wheelchairs in parking lots. Charles has worked hard to reassure him that he’s not going anywhere.

It never occurred to either of them that it could go the other way, that he could lose _Erik._

Now, sitting by the profusion of tubes and monitors that is his husband’s ICU bed, Charles struggles to make sense of what the doctor is saying. How is he supposed to focus with Erik lying just a few inches away, so terrifyingly still?

_Coma,_ the doctor says, that much Charles understands. _Head trauma. Possible brain damage. Impossible to know until he wakes up._

If he wakes up.

Erik wasn’t injured in the initial pile-up, they say. He was trying to pull someone else, a stranger, free of the wreckage. As if he could lift two tons of metal by himself.

So few people in Erik’s life would believe it, Charles thought. Everyone seems to think of Charles as the nice one, the loving one, the one who cares about others. Erik is the mean one. _How little they know you, love._ Charles reaches for his husband’s hand, careful not to dislodge the medical detritus it bears, and presses it to trembling lips.

Visiting hours come and go, and no one tells Charles to leave. He senses this is a bad sign, that the careworn nurses for whom this is merely Tuesday would have no problem telling him to come back later, if they really thought there would be a later.

_Possible brain damage,_ the doctor said, and Charles thinks about possibilities — Erik blinded, amnesic, unable to speak, reduced to a child inside a man’s body. Thinks of telling him, _It’s all right. If you have to go, I’ll be all right._

But he wouldn’t be all right. And he remembers what Erik said, when he found Charles staring into the deep end of the pool at 3 o’clock in the morning. _“I don’t give one damn whether you want to stick around. I want you to stick around, and I’m selfish enough to use guilt and begging and whatever it takes to keep you. I am not letting you go.”_

"My turn to be selfish, Erik," Charles whispers. "Don’t you dare leave me. I’ll never forgive you if you leave me here alone."

Erik doesn’t wake up, not that night or the next, not for quite a long time. But that night, in the never-dark never-silence of a busy ICU, he squeezes Charles’s hand.


	22. Chocolate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous prompt for Charles having cocoa-scented shampoo. Road trip fluff!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On Tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/62219760400/fic-war-you-said-okay-give-us-fluffy-charles).

They’d been on the road for almost two weeks, and Erik was, to his own considerable surprise, having the time of his life. With his endless enthusiasm and good cheer, Charles made for an engaging, if sometimes exhausting, travel partner. He insisted on stopping at small-town museums and kitschy roadside attractions that Erik would have barely noted in passing, and though Erik grumbled and scowled the whole time, he found these stops unexpectedly pleasant — and he suspected Charles knew it. At night Charles inevitably chose the strangest hotel in the vicinity — places with doorknobs shaped like fish, zebra-striped wallpaper, spinning rainbow lights on the ceiling.

"I know you prefer the Hilton, my elegant friend, but we’re on the CIA’s dime. We ought to be responsible with it, don’t you think?"

This argument would have held more weight, Erik thought, if Charles hadn’t seemed determined to take as long as possible in between destinations, so that a journey Erik could have accomplished alone in half a day cost the two of them three or four nights in such “responsible” lodgings. Erik strongly suspected that low-rent living was simply such an enjoyable novelty for Charles that he was loathe to give it up.

Twice they picked up hitchhikers, Erik’s protests met with an airy, ”Remember who you’re talking to, I would know if they meant us harm.” On those occasions Erik spent the day staring grumpily out the windshield while Charles and their guest chattered and sang and — and flirted, for heaven’s sake, there was no other way to put it. Erik hated it, it was loud and irritating and intrusive, he couldn’t wait to drop off the interlopers at their destinations and get back to just himself and Charles. After all, that was the deal, right? Himself and Charles, no suits, no interference, no one else taking up all Charles’s attention and, and — and maybe it was time to pull over for the night.

— 

"I’m sure you’re hungry but I’m going to take a shower before we go out, if you don’t mind," Charles said as they dropped their bags on the beds. These had quilts with huge patchwork smiley-faces on them. "I feel like I’m covered in road dust."

"Go ahead." Erik sat on one of the beds briefly, as the bathroom door closed behind Charles, but realized he was sitting on a patchwork eyeball and had to get up. He found himself pacing the room, remember the day’s hitchhiker (dropped off two towns back), a scruffy, odorous young man who had smiled at Charles like he was the birthday present he’d always wanted, and Erik had wanted to punch him in the mouth because — because—

This room was too hot, why did they always keep hotel rooms so hot? Charles was going to be fresh and clean to go out to dinner while Erik was still sweaty and dirty from the road. At least he could change clothes, and not look quite as much like the two of them didn’t belong in the same room.

He was halfway through the process, shirtless and still buttoning the fresh trousers, when Charles came out of the bathroom wearing only a towel.

"Left all my clothes out here, silly me," Charles said, reaching for his suitcase, then froze mid-motion, staring at Erik.

"What?" Erik said, looking away to finish with the button, and _why_ was it so hot in here?

"Nothing," Charles said, his voice a little strangled. He opened the suitcase and threw on the first shirt he touched, very unlike his usual fastidiousness. A black turtleneck? Erik hadn’t realized Charles owned… "Oh, bugger!" Charles cried at the same moment that Erik recognized the shirt. "This is _your_ suitcase. Sorry, sorry — mine’s over here—”

He tried to brush past Erik to the other suitcase, but there wasn’t quite room. It occurred to Erik, distantly, that he could move over; he tried to shuffle a few inches, only to realize he was moving the wrong way. With the result that Charles was now wedged between Erik and the foot of the bed.

He expected Charles to shove him back, maybe laughing, maybe angry. Instead he held perfectly still, looking up into Erik’s face. His hair was wet, clinging to his face and neck, and it smelled clean and — sweet, like chocolate. Erik realized he was leaning quite close, to smell it better.

"Hotel shampoo," Charles stammered, "cocoa-scented, told you this was a lovely place."

"Oh." Words seemed to bubble up from inside Erik without his conscious permission. "I like chocolate. You couldn’t get it during the war. Afterward, the first money I got from—" no, he didn’t want to talk about his revenge killings right now, "—the first time I had money, one of the first things I did was buy all the chocolate in the first store I came to. And ate it all that night, ate until I was sick."

"I wish I’d been there," Charles murmured. "To see you that happy." 

"I wasn’t… that happy, really. Satisfaction isn’t the same as happiness." He raised a hand, without meaning to, touched Charles’s cheek, still warm and flushed from the shower. "I’m happy when I’m with you."

"You are, aren’t you?" Charles’s smile was surprised, wondering. He leaned in closer, sliding warm hands up Erik’s bare torso. Erik inhaled, but didn’t object, didn’t move away. For some minutes he stood frozen, heart pounding, and let Charles touch him — run fingertips across his chest, shoulders, arms, and down to his waist, the muscles in his stomach jumping at the contact. Charles was still wearing his turtleneck, and _only_ his turtleneck, the towel fallen to puddle on the floor, and this, this was what Erik had been wanting for weeks, since the first moment they met, how could he have not known that?

Charles leaned forward to press his lips to Erik’s collarbone, and suddenly Erik was capable of motion again, wrapping his arms around Charles and kissing chocolate-colored, cocoa-scented curls. He felt the vibration of Charles’s laugh as he tipped his head up to catch the next kiss on his lips, and the next, and the next, and the next.


	23. Peace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by [MaxKennedy24's artwork](http://maxkennedy24.tumblr.com/post/30979173189/x-men-first-class-erik-x-charles). Warning for character death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On Tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/62302763686/pinkninjapj-turtletotem-maxkennedy24-x).

The pain is very bad at first, but he can feel Charles easing it, blanking it from his mind. Charles would do that much, he thinks, for anyone, even someone who has spent years fighting him at every turn, even someone who put him in a wheelchair.

He’ll take it. He’s too tired and too selfish not to take everything he can from Charles.

Charles is stroking his hair, Erik realizes, and he shudders, relaxing into the touch. Charles is surely getting blood on his hands, a fate he’s always tried so hard to avoid. _I’m sorry,_ Erik tries to say.

_Oh, Erik._ Charles’s voice in his head is tight and shaking with pain. Of course Erik has managed to hurt him again. It’s all he ever does.

_No, Erik, don’t – It’s all right, love._

_Forgive me._

_Always. So many times, even when I shouldn’t. Always._

This is what he’s always wanted, he might as well admit it. To lay himself down at Charles’s feet and give up – some part of him always wanted that, and fought Charles all the harder for it.

He’s not fighting now.

He tries to focus, burning whatever strength he has left to give himself this moment – the warm hand in his hair, the wasted legs beneath his cheek, the hum of metal in the wheelchair, the catch of Charles’s breath as he tries to swallow tears.

He’ll take it. It’s closer to a peaceful death than he ever expected to get.

He lets out a breath, and doesn’t take another.


	24. Partners in Crime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Cherik’ing of the following, as requested by Kageillusionz:
> 
> [i got paired with a super hot guy for a project in my criminal justice class and he just came up to me and said “oh my god you know what we are? we’re partners in crime! get it?” and then we both changed each others contact in our phone to “partner in crime” and now i kinda wanna marry him](http://sarahkeilman94.tumblr.com/post/77125891241)
> 
> Found on Tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/78403796607/partners-in-crime)

Criminal Justice 101 was a very important class for Erik. Whatever form his fight for mutant rights eventually took, he knew he would need a very thorough grounding in criminal law, if only so he’d know how to break the rules without getting caught. So having That Boy in his class was actually very irritating — no, beyond irritating, _a threat to his goals and dreams,_ that’s what it was, having That Boy just… sitting over there scrubbing his hands through luscious chocolate-colored hair, chewing mercilessly at his own lips and frowning at his notes with a tiny worry-line between brilliant caribbean-blue eyes. He was _distracting_ and Erik couldn’t afford that.

He started every class resolved not to look That Boy’s way at all, not even once to see if he were there or not. Once or twice he even managed it, until something would happen like — like the clatter of a pen falling and That Boy coming half out of his seat, rear in the air, trying to catch it as it rolled away, standing up to flush pink as the class laughed but taking it with a flourishing bow. Or the teacher calling on him and that rich accented voice filling the room with passionate, articulate, deeply-considered ideas miles above what anyone else had to say, even if he was _wrong wrong so laughably naive and wrong._ Or the one time a girl in the back row had a seizure and That Boy was the first to notice and the only one to keep his head, snapping orders to clear the furniture away from her, ripping off his cardigan to put between her skull and the hard floor, walking her to the campus clinic afterward.

A constant distraction, that’s what he was, and Erik didn’t need that, no matter how jaw-droppingly hot he was while tearing off a cardigan and barking orders. Erik was here for a _purpose._

So when the professor announced that their next project would be 30% of their grade, Erik was so intent on taking meticulous notes of the requirements that he almost missed the name of his project partner being called.

"Erik Lehnsherr and Charles Xavier."

Charles Xavier, who was that? Erik looked around, struggling not to let his attention snag on That Boy who was out of his seat and walking… toward him…

"Well, Erik, looks like we’re to be partners in crime," That Boy said, delicious voice lilting with delight, and yes, he actually sounded _extremely proud_ of that pun. Erik stared, stomach dropping out his shoes. “B-because it’s criminal justice class, see,” That Boy — Charles — added, faltering a bit at Erik’s expression.

"Yeah, I get it." A half-smile snuck onto Erik’s face without his permission as Charles brightened again, plucked Erik’s phone off his desk and started putting his number in as _Partner In Crime._

He’d been robbed, Erik realized. His heart had been stolen right out from under his nose. The only recourse now was revenge — stealing Charles’s as a replacement. It would be a heist for the ages, and he couldn’t wait to get started.


	25. Partners in Crime II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sequel to previous chapter! On Tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/78808388528/partners-in-crime-ii).

The criminal justice project was almost over, and the heist was not going as planned.

The first few days, of course, Erik had had to spend casing the scene of the crime, ascertaining the strengths and weaknesses of its security. It was a maddening process. Every initial advantage (he and Charles had interests in common, such as mutant rights and chess; Charles flirted with him frequently and seemed to enjoy his company) was soon canceled out by an equal disadvantage (they had diametrically opposite opinions within those interests; Charles flirted with _everyone_ and enjoyed _everyone’s_ company).

After that came a full day of strategizing, building a plan of attack; Erik spent five straight hours on Wikipedia researching the courtship methods of various cultures and species. Certain practices of the wolf and the bird of paradise seemed promising; the praying mantis he struck right off the list, after watching several YouTube videos in horrified fascination.

There was, of course, Charles’s telepathy to consider, but Erik hardly knew whether to call it a friend or foe in this context. Did he _want_ Charles to telepathically discover Erik’s interest? It would save effort, but – Charles was worth effort. No, this needed to happen on Erik’s timetable. He had to win Charles over before tipping his hand. So that was another day of research, learning mental shielding mechanisms so Charles wouldn’t overhear anything he shouldn’t.

What if he already _did_ know, whispered a voice in the back of Erik’s mind, and was ignoring it as a method of polite rejection?

He found that little whisper could be buried under a few fingers of vodka, as necessary.

Speaking of alcohol, he did once, in a moment of tipsy ambivalence, try _thinking_ his intentions at Charles. They had worked on their project at the library until their brains burned out, then ended up at Charles’s apartment, unwinding with halfhearted chess and a few beers. But Charles’s only reaction was to blink and shake his head sharply, like a wet dog, then move his bishop to checkmate Erik’s king.

Strategy, then. And what, exactly, would Erik’s strategy be? A direct approach was too risky. One couldn’t simply walk into a bank and bang on the vault door demanding money. You’d get carted off to jail with still-empty pockets. In this case, that translated into Erik planting a big, sloppy kiss on Charles’s mouth and asking “Your place or mine?” and Charles responding with a horrified vow never to speak to him again.

He had to persuade Charles that Erik was _worth_ opening that vault for. Thus the research on wooing.

Gifts were an important first step. The straight razor didn’t go over as well he had expected, but Charles greeted the fingerless gloves with a brilliant smile that made Erik’s knees go a little melty. He was still saving up for a matching hoodie; surely something to keep him warm would be a romantic gesture?

Then there were displays of physical prowess. Before the end of the first week, Erik had found opportunities to prove to Charles that he could not only carry books and shopping bags, but fix toilets _and_ wash cars shirtless. He was very pleased to note that this last, when Charles came to meet him at the mutant-daycare fundraiser car wash, made him drop his caramel macchiato all over the sidewalk.

So there was definitely progress being made.

Erik attempted a stealth-date at that point, a casual invitation to go check out the new Thai place after an afternoon working on their project. Charles had eagerly agreed… and then brought his sister along. Raven turned out to be excellent company, engaging and fun, not nearly as hung up on overly-optimistic claptrap as her brother – but still. Not really what Erik had had in mind.

Now, the night before the project was due, he was beginning to despair.

"Don’t look so down, Erik," Charles said, nudging his shoulder as they covered an entire library table with the bits and pieces they still needed to assemble. "I think once we get started, it’ll all come together very nicely."

"I’m not worried about the project." He wasn’t; it was the product of the two best brains in the classroom and therefore guaranteed to set the curve, but even if it hadn’t been, Erik was finding it a lot harder to care about his studies these days. He’d been right about That Boy being a distraction. One he wouldn’t give up for the world.

"What’s the matter, then? I can feel the anxiety radiating from you, and you know that’s not metaphorical."

"Sorry." He tightened his shields hurriedly.

"No, no, don’t – I mean, of course you can shield all you want, I don’t mean that. But y-you don’t have to. I don’t mind. Hearing you. Feeling you around."

Their gazes locked for a long, long moment, and Erik felt his pulse pick up. But then Charles was turning away, pulling a paper from the rightmost pile, talking about annotations and the questionable relevance of the Brightman precedent.

_I’m not worried about the project,_ Erik wanted to say. _I’m worried about when it’s over. I’ve grown so used to spending every spare moment with you, teasing you about your Britishisms, learning how you like your tea, watching your hands move when you talk. You’re brilliant and obnoxious and ridiculously kind to everyone. Having you around is like all the best parts of having a cat and a prince and a best friend at the same time and I don’t ever want to study alone again._

Wooing. Courting. Convince him to open the vault. Erik took a deep breath and started sorting papers.

The project did come together, eventually. The library closed at midnight; ten minutes before, Erik went to pick up their final print-out, and came back to find Charles asleep face-down in his notes.

For a moment Erik just looked at him, feeling a painful tug somewhere inside his ribcage. What would it be like to wake up and find that drowsy head on the pillow beside him? See those eyes crinkle and flinch away from the light, then remember (as he always did halfway through his morning tea) that it was a glorious new day full of possibility? Erik might never know. Their project would be turned in less than twelve hours from now. Charles would go back to his side of the room, his one-time Partner in Crime forgotten.

"Wake up, Charles," Erik said reluctantly, brushing a brief, casual hand through Charles’s hair. "The library’s closing, we have to go."

Charles woke with a gasp, swaying in his seat as he got his bearings. Erik instinctively took hold of his shoulders to steady him.

"Oh! Yes, right, sorry." He fumbled to his feet, and blinked blearily as Erik gathered up their things and led him out of the library.

Erik watched in some concern as they made their way down the sidewalk. “You want to just crash at my dorm tonight?”

"No, no, there’s one more bus tonight, I checked."

"Yeah, but you look like you might topple over into the gutter anywhere between the bus and your apartment."

"Don’t be ridiculous," Charles said through a powerful yawn.

"Come on, my place is closer than the bus stop if we go this way, and my roommate’s basically moved in with his girlfriend, I haven’t seen him in weeks."

"Oh, I couldn’t possibly—" He jerked to a stop, suddenly glaring cross-eyed at his own nose with an expression of deep affront.

"Charles…?" The mystery was solved when Erik felt a raindrop on his own face, cold and unwelcome. "Oh, come _on…”_

"Race you!" Charles said, and dashed off through the rain.

All the other students complained about the dorms, but not Erik. With his own bed, desk, and dresser, it was a great improvement over his last foster home, so he was more than content. The roommate had been an annoyance, but, as he’d told Charles, was now largely a thing of the past, so Erik was able to keep the place arranged the way he liked it – organized, efficient, comfortably practical.

"You know, I’ve never actually been here before," Charles said, looking around curiously as they toweled themselves off. There was no trace of sleepiness in him now; ‘bright-eyed and bushy-tailed’ was the phrase that came to mind. "How in the world can you keep it so neat, it’s marvelous.”

Erik shrugged and, to hide a sudden, inexplicable blush, pulled the towel over his head to ruffle at his wet hair. Demonstrating the ability to maintain a snug nest, he recalled suddenly, was an important courtship ritual.

"I’ve got to get out of these wet clothes," Charles muttered, grimacing down at the jeans and semi-transparent T-shirt that were now clinging to… everything. Erik swallowed hard and handed Charles a pair of clean sweats. Charles whistled merrily as he shut himself into the bathroom (shared with another room) to change.

Right. Comfortable nest; next step was food. 

He was pulling a plate of pizza rolls out of the microwave when he heard Charles step out of the bathroom behind him.

"Oh, splendid, I’m starving,” Charles said with a happy sigh. “You take such good care of me, Erik.”

Erik turned around, and only instinctive use of his ability on the metal tray under the pizza rolls kept them from falling to the floor. He hadn’t expected to be so affected by the sight of Charles wearing his clothes, but _Charles was wearing his clothes._ Grey fabric pooled around his feet on the floor, and flopped over his wrists onto his knuckles; as Erik watched, Charles bent to roll up the trouser legs, revealing perfect little pink toes.

Erik had stepped closer without fully intending to. Charles reached for a pizza roll.

"No," Erik blurted, plucking the roll out of his fingers. "They’re too hot still, you’ll burn yourself."

Charles smiled, as if Erik had something particularly adorable. “I’m pretty sure I can handle it, Erik,” he said, and gently steered Erik’s wrist back toward him, until he could take a nibble from the corner of the pizza roll, barely brushing Erik’s skin with his lips.

Erik would have said all his higher brain functions short-circuited at that point, but there was worse to come. A ragged inhalation informed him that, rather than the clean sweats he thought he’d handed Charles, he was wearing the pair Erik had used for his morning run, which smelled lightly – only lightly, he insisted to the mortified scream somewhere in his head – of his own body. Mingled now with the scents of rain and library books and Charles.

"I’m so sorry," he heard himself babbling. "Those are – those are mine, I thought I’d given you clean ones, I would never give you dirty things, Charles, only ever the best things—"

"It’s fine, Erik," Charles said, still smiling, still touching his wrist. "You did give me clean ones. I found these in the bathroom and decided I liked them better." He leaned closer, tilting his head a little to the side. "Don’t you like the way they look on me?"

That was when Erik dropped the tray, grabbed Charles with both hands, and kissed him.

Fireworks. The room spinning. Nothing else existing in the world. All the movie cliches Erik had ever laughed at were suddenly real and beautiful and _happening to him right now,_ and if Charles made that happy little noise in his throat again Erik thought he might actually faint.

"Well _finally,”_ Charles said some indeterminate amount of time later, when they broke apart an inch or two to breathe.

"Finally? What do you… are you saying…"

"Yes, of course I knew." Charles’s chuckle seemed to echo through Erik’s own chest, still pressed tightly together. "I am a telepath, after all."

"Then why didn’t you—"

"It seemed so important to you to woo me properly. I didn’t want to take that away from you." He tipped his head up to bump their noses together tenderly. "But I finally couldn’t resist helping you along a bit. I hope you don’t mind."

He might mind more, Erik thought, if he weren’t so deeply satisfied by the way Charles was still a little breathless, eyes dazed and dilated from kissing him.

The mischief softening from his gaze, Charles took Erik’s hand and pressed it to his chest, over the heartbeat still galloping under the borrowed sweatshirt. “Feel that?” he whispered. “All yours, my friend. Another successful heist for the criminal partnership of Xavier and Lehnsherr.”

Erik pulled the sweatshirt unceremoniously up and over Charles’s head, and bent to kiss the heart he’d stolen.


	26. Awake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "One of the boys becomes suddenly sexually aware of the other." Prompted by redwesteinde [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/81552593936/erik-charles-au-or-canon-just-one-of-the-boys).

Charles had always liked girls. His nanny joked that he had his sexual awakening at age four, when he went to his first opera and stared open-mouthed at a young, beautiful Carmen for eighty-five minutes without making a sound. He arrived at boarding school one week past his seventh birthday, and had a girlfriend approximately an hour and a half later. The very first time he used his telepathy on purpose and with perfect control, it was to find out whether the sixth grade class president thought he was cute.

(She did.)

As a telepath, he was not, of course, insensible to the existence of same-sex attraction – though it had been quite a shock the first time he accidentally “overheard” two of his male teachers checking each other out. Why would any guy want another guy when there were _girls_ around? Pretty, soft, curvy, sweet-smelling _girls?_ Girls liking each other, that he understood, because guys could be pretty awful. But how could a guy not like girls?

 _To each their own,_ he told himself with a shrug. _Less competition for me._

When he met Erik, their connection was immediate and intense beyond anything Charles had ever felt before, even for Raven, but it wasn’t… well, he just didn’t think of Erik that way. It wouldn’t occur to him to. Erik was a _man._

When they found Angel at the strip club, Charles did notice that Erik wasn’t nearly as distracted by the dancers as he himself was. He didn’t think much of it. He may have been exaggerating when he said he knew _everything_ about Erik, but he certainly knew the basic shape and texture of his mind; Erik wasn’t prone to idle lust, he saw no point in pursuing someone he couldn’t keep. Charles was somehow, very quietly, and a bit hypocritically, relieved that he wouldn’t have to deal with Erik making casual hookups along the way. He didn’t give much thought to that either, not then.

"What did you show her that was so amusing?" Erik asked when they returned to their hotel.

"I don’t think you’d appreciate it," Charles chuckled. "I may or may not have put you in a dress."

Erik rolled his eyes, annoyed. “Is this your way of saying you’d rather I was a woman?”

Erik continued casually unpacking his toiletry bag onto the side of the sink, but Charles, in the middle of unlacing his shoes, went stock-still.

If Erik were a woman, Charles would have been doing his level best to get her into bed from the very first day. And not for any casual fling, either. He would probably have been very quietly thinking about rings.

Erik was right. Some part of him _did_ wish Erik was a woman. Then he could be in love with with him – her – without being – without—

"Charles?" Erik raised an eyebrow at him, and Charles quickly straightened up, kicking off his shoes with the laces still tied.

"What a silly thing to say, Erik." His voice sounded both waspish and breathless to his own ears. He brushed past Erik to take his place at the sink with his own bag of toiletries. "Of course I don’t wish you were a woman. We could hardly travel together like this if you were, it wouldn’t be at all proper, and in any case you – well, you’d be an entirely different person, you wouldn’t be Erik, and I happen to think you’re perfect just the way you are."

It was true, it would be terrible for any part of Erik to be lost, even the sharp, predatory angles of his body, and Charles didn’t mean to look at him in the mirror, didn’t mean to catch the flicker of vulnerable expression on his face, or catch the edge of a wistful _I wish he meant that._

Charles turned around, caught Erik’s arm when he would have withdrawn, and they were standing much too close together, crowded against the sink with their chests almost brushing. Charles’s breath caught in his throat, trapped there by a wash of sharp warmth that he’d only ever felt for women before.

For a long, long moment they were both still, before Erik – didn’t move, didn’t even decide to move, only conceived the _idea_ of moving, of taking a half step forward and bending his neck—

Charles flinched away, out of arm’s reach, heart hammering. “We should get some sleep,” he stammered, and they went to their separate beds, not exchanging another word the rest of that night.

But there were many other nights to come.


	27. Our Electric Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles is a laptop, Erik is his charger. Prompted by Kageillusionz [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/81552895391/cherik-charles-as-a-laptop-erik-as-a-laptop-charger). I still can't believe I wrote this.

"Would you relax?" Charles said, voice suffused with lazy fondness. "I’ve almost a quarter hour still, and even if I do die it’s not that big a disaster."

"Don’t even say that!" Erik snapped, still searching desperately along the molding for a power outlet. "Someday I might not be able to bring you back."

"That’s ridiculous, Erik."

"Your battery will lose effectiveness with time."

"Yes, and when it does, Raven will just keep us plugged together all the time." He trailed a pair of earbuds slyly over Erik’s back. "Won’t that be lovely?"

Erik just grumbled and slid under the dresser, still searching.

"I’m more worried about Raven’s term paper than anything else," Charles sighed. "She hasn’t saved it yet, and I may or may not be able to hold onto it if I die."

"Please stop saying that."

"If I run out of power, then."

"That girl is maddeningly irresponsible. Unsaved documents, overloaded video cards, drags you to a stranger’s house and leaves your battery to d—run itself down… She even gave you a  _virus_ , Charles.”

"One time! And she was  _ever_  so sorry, Erik. I do wish you’d let it go, everyone gets viruses now and again.”

"What if it had scrambled your entire hard drive? What if you’d had to be completely wiped? What if you didn’t even remember me?" Erik came out from under the dresser to glare up at Charles on the bed.

"Oh, Erik." Charles scooted closer to the edge of the bed, twining the earbuds around him. "I could never forget you, no matter what happened to my hard drive. Oh… Oh, dear." An orange light began to flash near his monitor, a warning appearing on the screen.  _5% battery life remaining_.

Erik swore and dove under the bed, toward the only wall yet unsearched. Charles heard a shout of triumph, and then a familiar wire shot out from under the comforter’s edge and homed in on Charles’s power port.

"Ahhh!" Charles shuddered as electricity flowed through him, hot and tingling. "Oh, Erik, that feels  _wonderful_.”

Raven shoved the bedroom door open just then, calling over her shoulder, “Just a second, I have to plug Charles in before we leave!”

"Raven," drifted a voice from the hallway, "you are the only person I ever  _hope_  to meet who treats her laptop like a person.”

“ _And_  his charger,” Raven chirped. “Erik gets very put out if you forget about him.”

"Whatever. Hurry up or we’ll miss the movie. Might have to put him – it,  _it_  – in another room, the only outlet in there is behind the bed—”

"Um… no, we seem to be fine." Raven ran a finger down the cord connecting Charles and Erik, tugged a little to pull Erik’s main body out from under the bed. Charles bit back laughter at her unsettled expression. "Okay then. I’m coming!" She trotted out the door.

"She named us," Erik said, "and yet she still doesn’t quite believe in us."

"Oh, nevermind it," Charles said, lowering his voice and dimming his screen. "It looks like we have a few hours to ourselves, and I’ve got quite a lot of… charging up to do."

"I can help you with that." Erik was proud of himself for not stammering the words as he pulled himself up onto the bed beside Charles. "Do you think the cord is in all the way? Maybe I should pull it out and try again."

"Mmm, fantastic idea…"

Charles’s earbuds were already twining around Erik’s cord in a most distracting way, so Erik didn’t notice when Raven leaned back into the room to grab her purse. Charles made sure to snap a picture of her expression with the webcam to show him later.


	28. Play To Your Strengths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> StayAtHomeDadErik! loves his life. Prompted anonymously [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/81553647761/prompt-stayathomedaderik-loves-his-life).

They agreed Charles should be the one to stay home. He enjoyed his research and his teaching, but he didn’t mind scaling back and giving himself more flexibility, whereas Erik’s engineering work had strict and demanding hours. There was also the personality difference; neither of them said it out loud, but they both knew Charles was the patient, nurturing one, whereas Erik was in his high school yearbook as Most Likely To Go To Prison.

When the adoption finally went through and two-year-old Anya moved in, they both took time off to bond as a family. It was wonderful, and astonishingly stressful, and Charles was tearing his hair out by the second day, while Erik held onto his calm by the skin of his teeth.

By the end of the second week, Charles was  _still_  tearing his hair out, while Erik felt he had discovered some hitherto-unsuspected well of peace within himself that made it possible, nay  _enjoyable_ , to spend hours playing blocks and dolls and reading stories with only six words in them. There was something zen about it, really, once you narrowed your focus appropriately. Erik had never been accused of insufficient focus.

"I love Anya," Charles told him, desperate, near tears, after she’d been crying for three hours and Charles had to leave the flat or throw himself out a window, leaving Erik to get her to bed. "I love her so much. I’d die for her. And I like being around her, I  _do_ , I just—”

"Charles," Erik squeezed his hands, stroked his cheek. "I know you do. We’re all adjusting. You’ll get better at it. You’re fine."

They followed the plan, there was little else to do at that juncture. Erik went back to work, and Charles worked largely from home. But Erik found that he was constantly thinking and worrying and daydreaming about what was happening at home, and Charles, judging by his harried expressions, hunted eyes, and the way he would pounce on Erik the moment he came in the door, was not doing well trapped in a flat with a two-year-old all day.

"I can’t get anything done," he whispered into Erik’s shoulder in bed. "I swear she can’t stay out of trouble for two consecutive minutes. I tried to take a shower and when I got out she’d turned the coffee table over – I don’t know how she even moved it! The blasted thing’s solid oak, she could have been killed!"

"There’s this thing she does, wedging herself between the couch and the coffee table and pushing with her feet, it’s really pretty brilliant…" He trailed off at the look Charles gave him. "Um. I could work on some blueprints from home tomorrow," he offered, "and let you get some time in at your office—"

Charles burst into tears. “I love you, Erik.”

A month later, Erik officially became a Stay-At-Home Dad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sequel [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11785167)!


	29. Save the Last Dance for Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompted by Clawfoottub [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/81648494258/e-mail-forwards-of-the-marvel-universe-mansion-tour-tv). Listen to the song [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-XQ26KePUQ) or read the lyrics [here](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/drifters/savethelastdanceforme.html).

Few people seemed to notice that the blue-eyed boy hadn’t come to the club alone, and it was hard to blame them. While Blue Eyes worked the dancefloor, flashing smiles in all directions and drawing admirers like moths to flame, his companion lurked at a back table. He was far from unattractive himself, lean and angular with an entirely implausible shoulder-to-waist ratio, but he didn’t draw the eye the way Blue Eyes did, and seemed to prefer it that way, judging from the glare he shot at anyone who tried to approach.

Working his way slowly through a drink or two, he watched avidly as Blue Eyes conquered the dancefloor. More than one person would have thought him some sort of creeper, except that Blue Eyes did occasionally return his unwavering gaze – sometimes throwing him a wink, other times holding his eyes in something like challenge throughout an entire dance with someone else. Occasional flickers of affection and amusement broke through the lurking companion’s expression, usually when Blue Eyes was working his charm on some half-swooning dance partner.

He half-rose from his seat once, when a barrel-chested man with a beard tried to sweep the boy off to the restroom, and didn’t want to take no for an answer. Intervention proved unnecessary, however, as Blue Eyes, after the third polite refusal, clocked the man on the jaw hard enough to knock him to the floor. Security dragged the bearded man out the back door, and Blue Eyes resumed dancing.

Closing time approached, and the DJ announced the last song. For the first time since they came through the door, Blue Eyes circled around to his companion’s table – only to be met halfway, his tall friend already leading him back to the dancefloor with an arm around his waist. They danced slow and swaying, at odds with the music, wrapped tightly around each other with their eyes drifting closed. All the admirers who had spent the evening under Blue Eyes’ spell whispered amongst themselves, dismayed, even irritated, but a single dark glare from Blue Eyes’s companion shut them up in a hurry.

After the last dance, they walked out of the club hand in hand, pausing to kiss tenderly under a streetlight before they disappeared into the night.


	30. April Fools

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompted by pinkninjapj [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/82148581986/mutant-powers-on-april-fools).

Charles knew the day wasn’t going to go well when his first sip of tea revealed the sugar had been swapped for salt.

He didn’t even have time to warn Erik before he took a gulp of hot coffee — and proceeded to spray it across half the breakfast table, to a chorus of screams and laughter from the students.

It was the first of April, he realized. He should have seen it coming. He of all people, Erik would argue, should have seen it coming, but it wasn’t like he spent every minute of the day eavesdropping on everyone’s thoughts. Not only was that impractical and invasive, it would also be _dead boring._ Most people were not nearly as fascinating as they thought they were.

So, yes, the students had gotten them good. “I hope you’re all very proud of yourselves,” Charles drawled, wheeling his chair to the sink to pour out the tea. “Alex, Sean, you brilliant little masterminds get to clean up this mess and get Erik fresh coffee. I’ll handle my own tea, thank you.” He gave Sean a sideways glare as the boy dashed by to grab the kitchen towels. “I expect that to be the end of things, am I clear?”

He soon learned that he could expect it all he liked, but that wasn’t going to make it happen.

Alex rearranged all of Hank’s files alphabetically by the _second_ letter. Angel hovered outside the third-story bathroom window with a camera. Raven shifted into a zombie and scared Sean so badly that his scream shattered every window in the north wing of the mansion. Even Azazel, normally reserved, got in on the action, zipping members of the household off to locations around the globe for a half hour or so at a time. And that was to say nothing of the loosened jar lids, booby-trapped doors and salted toothbrushes that proved less easy to track to their perpetrators.

"I’m supposed to believe _you_ can’t discover who did this?” Erik demanded, gesturing at the chess set they had found rearranged – the pieces now glued down to spell a rude word.

"Of course I could," Charles said, rolling his eyes as he pushed his chair over to the dresser to gather his pajamas. "But we don’t want to discourage group bonding and creative thinking, now do we? And admit it, you rather enjoyed spending the afternoon in Thailand."

"I would have enjoyed it more if I’d known Azazel was planning to bring me back.”

"Oh, all’s well that ends well." Charles reeled him in with an arm around his knees to press a kiss to his hip – and Erik sidled away, dodging the gesture.

For a moment Charles just blinked at him, almost too shocked to be hurt. Resisting the temptation to dart in telepathically and see what the problem was – Erik hated that – he opened his mouth to speak.

"Fine," Erik interrupted, the word almost a groan. "I know I need to tell you." To Charles’s astonishment, he hiked his shirt up to his armpits, revealing… a distinctly rounded belly. "Hank says I’m due at the end of the summer. Secondary mutation."

Charles felt his jaw drop, and stay there as he stared, his brain exploding with contradictory emotions, _a baby, his and Erik’s_ baby—

And then Erik burst out laughing, bending double with it, loud and high and _nothing_ like his usual laugh – and nothing could stop Charles’s telepathy from surging forward and realizing the truth, just as a flurry of blue scales confirmed it, Erik entirely replaced by his oh-so-clever sister.

"Get out, Raven," Charles snapped.

"—should have seen your _face—”_

"I said get out!" Charles was horrified to hear his own voice crack, feel heat prickling in his eyes. 

Raven stopped laughing, looking stricken. “Charles, I… I didn’t mean—”

_"Just go!"_

She went.

Erik – the real Erik, he checked – came into the room an hour later. Raven had told him about her prank, Charles saw that in his mind. He sat down on the edge of the bed and just waited for a long moment, finally resting a hand on Charles’s shoulder when he didn’t turn over to look at him.

"I know she didn’t mean to be cruel," Charles whispered at last. "She couldn’t have known — _I_ didn’t know, how… how happy I would have been, how much I wanted…”

"I tore her a new one, if that helps."

Charles huffed the slightest hint of a laugh. “It does, a bit.”

Erik shifted on the bed, putting an arm around Charles and leaning down to kiss his temple. “I’m sorry for not being pregnant.”

Charles sighed, finally turning over — his upper half, at least — to stroke Erik’s cheek. “Well,” he said, venturing a crooked smile, “we can keep giving it the old college try…”

***

_One Year Later_

"That isn’t funny, Charles," Erik said flatly. "So far today I’ve been tripped, dunked, electrocuted, and left in the middle of Zimbabwe for an hour. Maybe this is your way of coping after last year, but it just isn’t funny."

"It wouldn’t be," Charles agreed readily, still smiling so hard his face hurt. "And I told Hank so repeatedly. But he’d already quadruple-checked his results. It can’t be anything else. I was worried about my paralysis interfering with a successful pregnancy, but he said he wasn’t nearly so concerned about that as about the birth. We’ll have to plan on a caesarean, but there are hints that my brilliant new secondary mutation may take care of things on its own." _I’m dead serious, darling. We’re having a baby._

Erik stared at him for a long time, before sinking carefully to his knees beside the wheelchair and resting a hand against the barely-discernible bump beneath Charles’s cardigan.

"The baby will be arriving in summer, thank goodness, in between terms," Charles said, twining his own overflowing happiness around Erik’s disbelieving awe and budding joy. "I’ll let you choose a boy name, if you like; if it’s a girl, I vote we name her April."


	31. Keeping It In the Family

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik really shouldn't find his stepbrother Charles so attractive. (Prompted by velvetcadence [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/82342185722/prompt-erik-really-shouldnt-find-his-stepbrother).)

They weren’t blood related, Erik reminded himself. They weren’t even related by marriage, not yet. It was okay, or at least not totally repulsive, that Erik couldn’t keep his eyes off his soon-to-be stepbrother as they walked through their parts. Again. Erik had thought it was silly for a wedding to even need rehearsing, but apparently it was more complicated than he’d thought.

"Like most things," his mother had sniffed, ruffling his hair. "Teenage boys, all you think about is food and cars and girls. You will learn better."

Erik hadn’t quite had the nerve yet to tell his mother that it wasn’t girls he thought about. They could deal with that after the wedding.

At least he knew his new stepfather would be okay about it. Charles had been out since junior high, apparently, and his dad seemed fine with it. His mother wasn’t, but that was why Charles had stayed with his father after the divorce.

"What do you think about this marriage business?" Charles had asked, the first time they met, two days after Brian and Edie announced their engagement. "I’m liking it, your mum’s terrific, but I’d understand if you weren’t as wild. I imagine it’s different when you’ve actually lost a parent. I hope you don’t feel like my dad’s trying to replace your dad or anything."

"No, nothing like that. Mama’s been alone a long time, I’m just happy to see her smiling again."

She was smiling right now, her attention all on Brian as Erik escorted her across the grass toward the _chuppah,_ the wedding canopy. Technically it ought to be the bride and groom’s parents escorting them, but since neither Edie nor Brian had any parents living, their sons were doing the job.

"Dad says in a Christian wedding I’d have been his best man," Charles whispered, sidling up next to him as Erik’s mother started the traditional seven-times walk around her soon-to-be husband. "I suppose that makes you the maid of honor."

Erik returned his teasing smile with a glare that, as usual, proved impossible to maintain in the face of Charles’s bright-eyed irrepressibleness. “You’re ridiculous,” Erik said.

"I’ll take that as the compliment you clearly meant it to be," Charles chirped. "You, on the other hand, are extremely serious and proper and not ridiculous at all, and I think we ought to do something about that."

Erik’s mother shot them a glare as she started her fifth round; Erik leaned close to Charles and lowered his voice to the faintest whisper. “Really? Like what?” Charles shivered subtly, and something in Erik’s gut gave a hard, not unpleasant twist.

"Well," Charles whispered back, soft lips brushing Erik’s ear, "I don’t know if you know this, but there’s a longstanding tradition about the best man and the maid of honor."

Erik choked.

"Boys," Brian broke in, looking a bit annoyed at their behavior, "maybe you should go help the caterer set up for the rehearsal dinner."

All Erik could do was stammer; Charles hooked his arm through Erik’s and pulled him away with a cheerful, “Sure, Dad! Enjoy rehearsing!”

Dinner would take place in the same rented hall as tomorrow’s reception; they made it into the dim vestibule, chatter and clacking plates echoing from the next room, before Charles crowded him up against the wall and kissed him.

Erik was too stunned to do anything but stand there. After a moment, Charles pulled back, looking worried and uncertain. “I… I’m sorry, Erik, I thought that you – I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, I’m very sorry and it won’t—”

Erik stopped the apologies with another kiss.

Kissing Charles was _amazing_ and natural and easy and fun, everything his previous shy attempts at dating hadn’t been, and they were both breathing hard by the time they backed off from each other.

"Charles, we – we can’t… I mean, we’ll be brothers tomorrow…"

Charles frowned at him, blinked, then smiled as if Erik had done something especially adorable. “My friend, I should like you to look up the definitions of ‘incest’ and ‘inbreeding’ and write me a five-page essay on all the reasons they do not in any way apply to us.” He leaned forward to place one last kiss on the tip of Erik’s nose. “In the meantime, I suppose we should help the caterers.”

"Well…" Erik slid his arms around Charles’s waist, drawing him back in. "They seem to be getting on just fine without us, really."

Charles brightened. “Maybe not just yet, then?”

"Not just yet," Erik agreed, and leaned down to kiss him again.


	32. Son of the Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dark Charles. Prompted by [thesadchicken](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/84585499871/dark-charles-omfg-dark-charles-is-the-scariest) based on [this graphic.](http://deus-not-exorior.tumblr.com/post/83285952066)

Erik never understood how it all went so wrong. Hank, Alex, Sean, Raven, Moira – all dead, in the plane, on the sand, in the water. Shaw and his teleporter vanishing before their eyes.

What Charles did to Angel and Riptide, left behind, should have been proof enough that the Charles he thought he knew was gone. He wanted to believe that new ruthlessness was simply an acknowledgement that Erik was right, that his methods were better. But the first time he had to talk Charles down from melting the brain of a flight attendant who wouldn’t let them on a plane they had no ticket for, he realized it went deeper than that. Something in Charles had broken.

"I never understood before," Charles whispered, clinging to him in a hotel bed they hadn’t paid for. "I thought I did. How it felt to lose your family. I understand now."

"We’ll find him," Erik said, the only comfort he could offer.

"Yes," Charles said, a hiss that chilled Erik’s blood. "We will."

They had slept together only once before Cuba, the last night before, slow and warm and silently terrified. Charles had been everything he could have dreamed, beautiful and loving. He was still beautiful, brilliant, like lightning now instead of sunlight, all kindness burned away. Erik didn’t mind waking with bruises and bitemarks, blood drying on his skin. It seemed to help Charles, a little, to exhaust himself that way.

Once – once only – he left their room while Charles slept, fetching ice from the machine for his swollen lip. Halfway back, he felt Charles’s mind fall on his like claws, sinking deep with rage and panic.

_You left me. You left me._

_I didn’t – Charles, I’m sorry—_ He was running back to the room now, ice dropped and forgotten, and it wasn’t any impulse of his own. He couldn’t stop.

_Don’t leave me._ Charles slammed him against the wall when he came through the door, wouldn’t release control of Erik’s body even when Erik would have wrapped arms around him. _You’re all I have left. Don’t leave me alone._

_I won’t._ Erik won enough control to touch his forehead to Charles’s, inches from the hot tears streaming down. _You’re not alone, Charles, you’re not alone._

Everything was backwards now. It was Erik’s turn to give comfort and make promises, and that was almost as terrifying as the icy, blank serenity with which Charles wielded his telepathy these days, clearing a path for their hunt with grim and thoughtless efficiency.

The information they’d taken from Shaw’s late associates led them, eventually, to Shaw. It was glorious to see the surprise on the man’s face – an expression that froze there as Charles invaded his mind, and held him still for Erik to kill.

_Slower, Erik. Please. Make it hurt. Please, Erik._

Erik was happy to comply, and told himself the sick feeling in his belly was anticipation, triumph, adrenaline – that it had nothing to do with the bloodlust pouring from Charles’s mind.

Afterward, Charles reached for him with blood-slick hands, and Erik went to him willingly. He didn’t try to fight when Charles borrowed his power to crush Shaw’s helmet. They would never speak about whether Erik had been planning to reach for it.

They would find other mutants. They knew that without having to discuss it. They would build an army to protect their people. Erik would stand at Charles’s side, willingly, fiercely, always.

He didn’t kid himself that Charles would ever let him leave, anyway.


	33. Artificial

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sequel to [traumschwinge's utterly heartbreaking ficlet](http://traumschwinge.tumblr.com/post/85613683942/erik-is-a-programmer-and-developer-working-on-ais) featuring Charles as an AI (written with permission from traumschwinge!). READ THAT ONE FIRST. This sequel is on tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/85685524626/traumschwinge-erik-is-a-programmer-and).

"Hello, you’ve reached Erik’s phone. He’s unable to answer but if you leave a message, I’ll make sure he gets back to you."

"What the _fuck.”_ Raven’s fingers tightened painfully around the phone because _what the fuck,_ that was her brother’s voice, that was—

"Raven." There was a long pause, and then the voice spoke again — deeper now, cool and near-monotone, free of any accent or emotion. "My apologies, Raven. You’ve changed your number."

"Who are you?" Raven demanded, trying not to let her voice shake like the rest of her was currently doing.

"I’m a prototype artificial intelligence system Erik is working on. He uses me to handle his scheduling and communications."

"This is sick. He’s _sick.”_

"I assure you, Erik is currently in fine health."

"He programmed Charles’s voice — why would he do that?”

There was another long pause before the AI answered. “Many people, after the loss of a loved one, experience a stage of grief known as ‘bargaining,’ in which they may feel they could accept their loss if only they could have one particular thing — a chance to say goodbye, for instance, or hear their loved one’s voice—”

Raven tried to draw breath and could only choke, half a sob and half a bitter laugh. The voice might have dropped all outward, obvious signs of Charles but the cadence, the word choice, the gentle infuriating well-meaning condescension — Erik had done his work well. “Erik, you bastard,” she whispered. “I didn’t get to say goodbye, either, you know.”

"I know," replied the AI. "No one did. He was declared dead at the scene of the accident."

Raven took a few deep breaths, trying to even herself out.

"I do apologize for upsetting you," the AI said, more gently still. "Did you want to leave a message for Erik?"

"I was going to invite him to dinner on Tuesday. The… the anniversary."

"I don’t imagine he’ll accept," and how was it remotely possible to program that familiar note of rueful fondness in a voice that didn’t even sound like Charles, "but I’ll tell him."

"I just didn’t want him to be alone."

"He’s not alone," the AI said. "He has me."

"I can see that. I… I should go." But she didn’t hang up, and neither did the AI. Finally, closing her eyes against her own shame, Raven whispered, "Can you… turn it back on? His voice?"

"Of course, Raven," Charles said, and the tears escaped her eyes at last, gliding down the line of her jaw. "Was there anything else you wanted to say?"

"Just… just goodbye. Goodbye, Charles. I love you."

"Goodbye, Raven." She had already disconnected, and didn’t hear him add, "I love you, too."


	34. Kiss With a Fist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by kaciart's fanart of DOFP Charles and Erik kissing, as seen [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/87764708641/kaciart-long-time-coming-logan-couldnt).

Logan couldn’t honestly say he was very surprised when the first thing Charles did was punch Magneto in the face.

The surprise came when Magneto got back to his feet and pressed Charles against the nearest wall, murmuring “Good to see you too, old friend,” just before kissing his mouth.

Charles not shoving him away, but instead closing his eyes and leaning into the kiss with every appearance of helpless hunger, keeping his arms stiffly at his sides but doing nothing to discourage the hands that curved around his body, more gently than Logan would have guessed Magneto was capable of — that went beyond surprise to mind-boggling shock.

_Great,_ Logan thought. _Like this mission wasn’t stupidly complicated enough without_ this.


	35. Closer to You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Prompted by velvetcadence](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/88144026326/between-charles-and-erik-tell-me-who-is-the), who said, "Between Charles and Erik, tell me who is the bigger cuddler."

Charles is accustomed to being the clingy one in bed, the one who dozes off with his face buried in his partner’s shoulder, keeps their legs tangled together, prompts exasperated shoves in the middle of the night and accusations of being half octopus. Physical contact is strangely grounding for him, helps him remember which mind is his, helps him feel like only one person touching one other person. (He’s really a great lover of all the joys of the senses — touch, food, alcohol, music — and whether that’s despite or because of the cerebral nature of his mutation is open for argument.)

With Erik, he tries to rein in that tactile overflow. Erik doesn’t appreciate excess as a general thing, and has serious issues with being restrained, feeling smothered. It’s taken a great deal of delicate maneuvering to get Erik into his bed, and Charles is terrified that one wrong move will send him racing out of the mansion altogether.

So when, after an interlude every bit as astonishing as Charles could have hoped for, Erik settles back against the pillows and lets his eyes drift shut, Charles resists the powerful urge to tuck himself in beside that long, lean, gorgeous body, to throw an arm across him and burrow in for the night. Instead he forces himself to be content with curling on his side facing Erik, only their toes brushing, and closes his own eyes without so much as an attempt at pillow-talk. Nothing to restrain Erik. Nothing to make him feel crowded, make him feel a need to flee.

He’s considerably surprised, then, to feel a brush of fingers against the back of his hand, tentative and feather-light. He opens his eyes to find Erik gazing at him, radiating uncertainty and shy hope. Unsure what’s being asked of him, unwilling to peek inside Erik’s head after being asked to keep out, Charles can only blink at him in what he hopes is a warm and reassuring manner.

Erik touches more boldly then, running his fingers up Charles’s arm and down his back, pulling him gently closer.

"Could we…" he whispers, hoarse and embarrassed, and pushes himself closer, tangling their legs together. "Is this all right?"

Charles feels a happy warmth bloom in his chest. “This is wonderful.”

Within moments they’re wrapped tightly together, Erik’s heartbeat a welcome drum in Charles’s ear, and he falls asleep to the sensation of Erik’s hand brushing slowly, steadily up and down his back, as if he just can’t get enough of touching him. Charles hopes he never does.


	36. Closer to You, Pt. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sequel to Closer to You, prompted by [further discussion](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/88240489916/between-charles-and-erik-tell-me-who-is-the) with velvetcadence of Erik's touch-starved nature.

Their second time together goes rather differently than the first. Charles had been so concerned, that first time, about the seduction, the show, about making it worth Erik’s time — and it’s not like that didn’t work, or wasn’t good, because it _definitely was._ It was more that he could see, now, a way to make it _better,_ to meet Erik’s needs more exactly. He’d been paying too much attention to the suave, severe Nazi-hunter, and not nearly enough to the touch-starved orphan.

It starts outside the bedroom entirely. The younger mutants are somewhat wary of Erik, giving him lots of personal space, but Charles makes a point of invading that bubble of emptiness every time he enters the room — anything from merely standing close by, to bumping shoulders, knocking knees, brushing invisible lint from Erik’s shirtfront, touching spots on his jaw that he hadn’t, actually, missed while shaving. When they sit down to lunch, Charles hooks a foot around his ankle. When Erik can’t see what Charles is pointing at through the window, Charles directs him with a hand at the nape of his neck.

Erik doesn’t say anything — Charles hadn’t expected he would — but he does start leaning into the little touches, letting them linger. More than once Charles catches him watching, breathless, lips parted, as Charles’s hand trails away from his skin.

When night comes and Hank needs someone to talk to, short-circuiting their bedtime plans, Charles steals a kiss in the hallway with a silent promise of _Tomorrow._

Tomorrow comes, and Charles is delighted to find his own game turned back on him, Erik finagling every little touch he can — a clap on the shoulder, a clasp of the wrist, a fingertip trailed across his collarbone. Charles has to muffle a startled squeak when Erik gropes his thigh under the table at lunch, and Raven wonders out loud whether they’ve both gotten a bit of sunburn.

Charles volunteers himself and Erik to wash the dishes after dinner, a gift none of the children question. The dishes do eventually get washed, and Charles is proud to say no one’s clothing gets removed in the process. In fact he’s firm on that point; this isn’t about that, it’s just about _touching,_ connecting, laughing under their breaths as they traverse the kitchen as a single multi-limbed creature, dragging each other about as warm, welcome, cooperative, kiss-stealing weights.

And when they finally go to bed, Charles takes off Erik’s clothes with slow, almost reverent fingers, greeting every new inch of skin with kisses and caresses that leave Erik radiating bliss and wonder — and something perilously close to love.


	37. Tender Spots

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arisu asked for [Cherik + inner thigh kiss](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/88813159106/cherik-inner-thigh-kiss-d).

It’s the first time they’ve been together since the beach — first time he’s been with anyone since then, in point of fact. And in spite of everything, Charles admits to himself as Erik kisses his way down his neck, he’s glad of that now. Yes, it’s terrifying and embarrassing being this vulnerable with Erik, all the worst things about his injury on display, but… it would have been even worse with anyone else. There’s no room in Erik’s focused, hard-angled mind for the kind of squeamishness and horrified pity that would have been the death of any other encounter — precious little room even for the remorse Erik so richly deserves to feel for causing this injury himself. Erik would never go to bed with someone out of pity or guilt; he could only be here because he wants to be. Because he wants Charles, scars and all.

This pragmatic approach doesn’t mean Erik is incapable of being tender or downright sentimental. Charles is reminded of that with every movement Erik makes now, trailing soft, lazy lips over Charles’s skin, combing fingers through the hair he insists is too long. Charles lets himself relax into it, basking in the glow of intent and enjoyment from Erik’s mind. He tries not to be nervous about how this will go when they get beyond the preliminaries, when Erik sees for himself how difficult it is for his body to fully participate these days, at least without the serum. He had tried to warn Erik, but his only response was that he was sure there was nothing to worry about. Nothing indeed!

His pulse picks up as Erik works his way down, but to his quiet panic, nothing down there is responding to the attention. It’s not usually quite this bad. Erik doesn’t seem disturbed yet, his mind still patient and confident, and Charles bites down on the urge to apologize, to frantically assure Erik that he _is_ interested, he _does_ want this, desperately, he wants Erik, please keep going—

With a frown he realizes Erik hasn’t stopped at, well, what he assumed was the destination. He’s peppered that stupidly unresponsive part with kisses, just like the rest, and then continued onward around the curve of his right hip and down his thigh.

Charles opens his mouth to tell Erik he can’t feel anything there, don’t bother, but to his surprise, he finds that he _is_ feeling it. It’s muted, to be sure, but a faint sense of warm and pressure is definitely coming through. Even more surprising are the tears that prick in his eyes at the realization. It’s not like he’s missed being kissed on the leg — in fact he isn’t sure it’s ever happened before. But somehow being able to feel _anything_ now, several weeks after giving up the serum entirely, seems magical, and for it to be — for it to be Erik, touching him this way — suddenly Charles is fighting not to cry.

Erik, responding to the hitch in Charles’s breathing or perhaps the hand tightening in his hair, glances up at him with a silent, _You all right?_ Charles nods, and Erik’s concern melts into a smug smile.

"You like this, then?" He gently spreads Charles’s legs further and presses a firm, thorough kiss to the tenderest part of his inner thigh, complete with a slight nip of teeth.

It _tickles._

It’s hard to say which of them is the more startled by Charles’s bark of laughter. Erik recovers first, nuzzling the spot again, which elicits the same response. Before Charles knows it he is being pinned down and comprehensively tickled, thrashing and shrieking to no avail. Finally he is able to get a good grip on Erik’s head with both hands and drags him up to crash their breathless grins together, a kiss that gentles and deepens immediately, arms winding tight around each other.

"Told you," Erik murmurs eventually, "there was nothing to worry about."

And for the first time, even with his body as stubbornly uncooperative as ever, Charles thinks he might just slightly believe him.


	38. Across the Divide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone somewhere said they would have liked to see old!Erik being gentle and protective with young!Charles.
> 
> This takes place just after Charles has his telepathic conversation with his older self, in an AU I guess where young!Erik is there, too.
> 
> (On Tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/91191241756/across-the-divide).)

"I’d forgotten you did that with your hair." The old man’s eyes were gentle, fond, wry. "He’ll never admit it," he jerked his head toward Erik, standing frozen in the currently-timeless space that was Cerebro in that moment of 1973, "but he likes the beard."

"Who are you?" Charles asked, though he suspected.

"I’m what he could become." The old man was looking at Erik now, expression a peculiar mix of sadness, exasperation and affection, as if he were looking a troublesome son or nephew who was having a rough transition to adulthood. "What he needs to become, and yet — so much of what I am now is built on the mistakes I’d rather he didn’t make. That he can’t afford to make, if we’re going to truly change things.”

"Can I trust him?" Charles asked, because he had to know, had to stop expecting another bullet in the back if this was going to work.

To his dismay, the old man’s lips twisted. “You can trust me to do what I think is best for mutantkind. You always could. Whether that matches with your own ideas of what’s best, or even — at this point in my life — with any particular truth about reality… This much I can tell you. This much you need to understand.” He stepped forward, raising wrinkled hands. Charles blinked, but let him settle warm fingers against his face, cradling it with a tenderness he would never have suspected — well, no, he might be the only one on earth who would suspect — Erik to be capable of. “Whatever I do, and however badly I hurt you,” the old man whispered, “and I do hurt you so badly — it’s never because I desire your pain.”

"What do you want, then? What does he _want_ from me?”

"Love." He smiled wryly. "Ideally, of course, your unflinching admiration and support of his ideals and brilliant plans. But in truth, just knowing — really _knowing_ — that you still love him even when you think he’s being stupid, or grandiose, or downright evil, even when you’re fighting tooth and nail against everything he’s trying to accomplish… It can save him, Charles. It _will_ save him. I’m proof.”

Charles felt tears prick in his eyes all over again, as if he hadn’t wept enough over Erik Lehnsherr, and he didn’t even know whether he was more relieved or burdened to know that Erik couldn’t just be written off as a monster and put down.

"But that doesn’t mean you have to let him hurt you." Old Erik traced a hand along the very edges of Charles’s hair, as if he were almost too precious to touch. "Believe me, you’ll be doing him no favors. Please, Charles, don’t let me hurt you."

"Believe _me,"_ Charles said. "I have no intention of it."

"Ah, there you are, my old friend. I knew you were in there somewhere." The old man chuckled, and before Charles could react, faded away.


	39. Share and Share Alike

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Anonymous prompt:](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/96514620181/somebody-told-me-you-had-a-boyfriend-that-looked) "Somebody told me you had a boyfriend that looked like a girlfriend I had in February of last year." (Dragneto, Charles/Erik/Raven, and crack!)

At first it looked likely to be a great row, the discovery that between shapeshifting, cross-dressing, and bisexuality, the three of them had all managed to be each other’s one-night-stands during the last month. It couldn’t help but be awkward, surely, when they had all been the closest of friends for years, even after Charles and Raven’s respective parentals divorced each other.

"Wait just a moment though," Charles said, voice high with outrage. "You two ninnies can claim you didn’t recognize each other, but unless you’re claiming I fiddled with your heads _which I didn’t,_ there’s no way neither of you recognized _me.”_

Raven and Erik exchanged sheepish half-smiles. “We both pretty much fancy you to next Wednesday and back, Charles,” Raven said, “you’ve just never noticed.”

"Well then," Charles said after a long moment of stunned silence. "I do rather think we all love each other enough to _share.”_


	40. The Princess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Prompted by kernezelda.](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/96516490146/the-princess) Sharon adoring her blue-eyed, blonde daughter, Raven, and putting her to bed for the first time after Charles mind-whammies her.

"My beautiful girl," Sharon murmurs fondly, running fingers through the blonde hair flung across Raven’s pillow. "You look more like me every day." She has never seen Raven before tonight.

"You’re so pretty, Mommy," Raven whispers, chewing the edge of her blanket. "I hope I grow up to look just like you."

Sharon smiles. “You have your father’s eyes. Do you remember him rocking you, singing to you? He loved you so much.” It was Charles that he sang to, and to his knowledge Sharon never witnessed it.

"I remember," Raven says, eyes shining. All she remembers is a picture of Brian that Charles showed her an hour ago. "He called me Princess."

"Of course you’re a princess." Sharon strokes her peachy little cheek. "And tomorrow we’ll get you that pink bed canopy you’ve been wanting."

Raven has never mentioned any such thing. “Really?” she says excitedly. “Oh, Mommy, it’s going to be so perfect!”

"Only the most perfect things for my little girl." Sharon kisses Raven’s forehead and tucks the covers under her chin. "Here’s your nightlight, and your teddy bear. Sleep now, darling. I love you."

"I love you too, Mommy," Raven says, and makes her lean down again to receive a kiss on the cheek.

Raven is crying when Charles creeps into the room, happy tears that catch in the blue scales of her face. “Oh, Charles, thank you! I can’t believe I finally have a family. I’m so happy!”

"I’m so happy to have a sister," Charles says, crawling into bed beside her. His head hurts terribly and the nightlight makes it worse, but he leaves it on for Raven, and burrows down to sleep beside her instead of going back to the dark bedroom Sharon has not entered in as long as he can remember.


	41. Preying on You Tonight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Anonymous prompt.](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/96591891791/maybe-you-think-you-can-hide-but-i-smell-your) "Maybe you think you can hide but I smell your scent from miles. You run but it's not enough." Alpha!Erik

Charles always knew his one chance for freedom was to run away during the narrow time window between his stepfather relinquishing control and his new alpha establishing it. It didn’t matter that Kurt had sold him to the most severe, cold-eyed man Charles had ever seen, one whose mind was as sharp and unbending as the metal he manipulated. Charles wouldn’t have to put up with him for long.

He didn’t count on the telepathy-proof helmet that kept him from throwing Erik off the trail when he pursued.

They spent three days in the forest surrounding Erik’s home, Erik cutting Charles off anytime he tried to get to the road, but otherwise gaining on him only gradually, as if trying not to alarm him.

"You can keep hiding from me, Charles," Erik said on the third day, casually, as if speaking to the air while one’s omega hid in a nearby tree was the most normal thing in the world. "But you won’t get away. I can follow your scent forever." He inhaled deeply with every evidence of enjoyment, and slanted his eyes toward the tree, showing that he knew exactly where Charles was. "You’ve given me an admirable challenge. I respect you more for it. But it’s time to come home."

"And put myself entirely into your power for the rest of my life?" Charles said. "I’d rather starve in the woods."

Erik was silent for a long time. “A fair point,” he said at last. “I can’t demand the trust of a spirit as fiery as yours, and offer none in return.” He pulled the helmet off and dropped it to the ground.

Anyone watching would have only seen Erik standing frozen among the trees, alone, for long minutes – then Charles dropping from the tree and approaching softly, carefully, two fingertips pressed to his temple.

The sinking sun was sending shafts of golden light between the trees when the tableau finally broke. Both faces were glowing and glinting with tears as Charles let his new alpha pull him close, and kiss him with a peculiarly tender possessiveness that Charles knew he would find nowhere else. They held hands through the forest as Erik led him home.


	42. You're Still In My Head, Forever Stuck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Anon prompt.](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/96591901341/hes-hes-still-in-my-head-you-can-start) Counterpart to previous chapter, _Preying On You Tonight_ \-- Alpha!Charles.
> 
> Title, as with the previous, from Maroon 5's "Animals."

Erik had always planned to run away. He knew it would be his one chance at freedom – to disappear during the narrow window of time after his alpha uncle relinquished control of him, and before his new alpha established it. He’d therefore paid little mind to who his uncle sold him to; it didn’t matter, because he wouldn’t have to put up with the man for long.

He wasn’t counting on his new alpha being a telepath.

Charles made no attempt to keep him from creeping away in the middle of the night. He didn’t report him to the police, or send anyone after him. In fact, as Erik traveled, he occasionally arrived somewhere to find a room already reserved in his name, or a packet of money left for him to pick up.

Every night, no matter how far he journeyed, he heard Charles’s voice in his head – warm and persistent, maddeningly gentle.

_Run wherever you like, Erik. When you’re ready, you’ll come back to me. I’ll be here with open arms._

Erik put a pillow uselessly over his head, and would not admit he was dreaming of that day already.


	43. The Blindest Date

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Black Betty prompted 'mistaken identity; one of them thinks the other is their blind date.'](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/97865612296/the-blindest-date)

Erik isn’t sure how Emma talked him into this blind date. Well, that’s not true; he knows full well that Emma didn’t talk him into anything, she just bowled him right over as usual. With friends like her, who needs enemies?

"I’ll tell him you’ll wear that green ascot you like despite your otherwise high intelligence," she said casually, typing in the password to access his schedule and block off Friday night. "He’ll wear green as well, he always does. He’s tall, has longish dark hair, witty, and just as screwed-up as you are. You’ll get along great and probably take over the world together."

What was the name? Erik racks his memory, but can’t bring it up. Something Scandinavian, maybe. Odinsson?

He pauses outside the door to the bar, adjusts his ascot in the glass. This is going to be a disaster, but at least he’s going into it looking his best.  
He steps inside and rakes his gaze over every man at the bar. Nobody wearing green. He takes a seat and orders a beer — German, of course.

Minutes pass. Half an hour. He’s already standing up, mentally preparing an extensive diatribe for Emma, when someone takes the stool next to his, wearing a brilliant neon green Hawaiian shirt.

"Whiskey straight, make it a double," he calls to the bartender, as if he can’t get alcohol into his body fast enough.

Erik pauses, looks him up and down. Wearing green. Messy brown hair hanging past his chin. Too soon to say “witty,” despite the American tendency to ascribe that quality to anyone with an English accent. “Just as screwed-up as you” — Erik decides that Emma definitely _did_ intend that as an insult, because this man looks like he’s spent the last week sleeping under a bridge. He doesn’t smell like it, at least, and that holds Erik in place long enough for the man to notice him and return his up-and-down gaze.

"Well," he says after a moment. "If I’d known _you_ were waiting for me, I’d have gotten here sooner.”

So it’s him, then. “Sweet of you,” Erik grouses, and reluctantly takes his seat again. “Erik Lehnsherr.”

"Charles Xavier." They shake hands, and Erik has to admit that under the beard and general scruffiness, the man is sort of attractive. He has beautiful eyes, and a surprisingly appealing smile.

"Charles Xavier," Erik says, "what do you think of the Stark-Rogers Educational Equality Act?"

Charles raises his eyebrows and huffs a laugh into his first sip of whiskey. “Quite a conversation opener.”

"I see no reason to waste any _more_ time,” Erik says pointedly. “I’m a very political person. If we’re not compatible, there’s no point in pursuing this any further.”

"A man who knows what he wants," Charles murmurs, looking not at all displeased. "As it happens, I think the Stark-Rogers Educational Equality Act is brilliant in its premise, despite certain inevitable difficulties that will arise in its execution."

"Maybe it was brilliant in its first stages, but it’s been run through enough stupidity filters — pardon, I mean committees — to have lost any punch it might have held."

"Lost its punch? It’s going to turn the entire educational system on its head. Which, like I said, will certainly pose problems of its own—"

"It won’t turn things nearly far enough. The number of children who still won’t have access to resources just because of—"

"We’ll be a sight better off than we were!"

"Oh, it’s better than nothing, so we need to bow down and worship it?"

"I never said _that,”_ Charles says, and Erik is startled to realize how closely they’re leaning together. And how very smug Charles looks, his drink forgotten, eyes bright in a face that’s considerably more attractive than he first thought. “Though I’m wondering what exactly you _would_ consider — how did you put it — bowing down and worshiping?”

"Charles," Erik says, torn between amused and appalled as he realizes Charles seems to consider that a pick-up line, "I don’t think we know each other well enough for me to say."

"Erik," Charles says, and tosses back the rest of his drink, "I think we should fix that."

—

Two hours later, when Charles has him pressed up against the wall of his apartment building, Erik smiles and mumbles something about Emma being right after all.

"Ah," Charles says, pulling back a bit. "What did Emma say exactly?"

"Well, she mentioned us taking over the world together." Erik tries to dip in for a nip at Charles’s earlobe, but Charles leans back, evading.

"I have a confession to make, my friend," he says, his smile going a little strained, nervous. "I’ve never heard of your friend Emma. Whoever it was you were meant to meet at the bar — and I’ve long since gathered there was someone — it wasn’t me."

Erik lets his arms lift a few inches away from Charles’s body, staring. Charles bites his lip, staring back, his eyes a silent plea.

"Well," Erik says after a long moment, "does that mean you _don’t_ want to take over the world with me?”

"I never said that," Charles says indignantly, "stop putting words in my mouth, you seem very fond of that habit—"

"I can think of better things to put there," Erik admits, and pulls him close again.


	44. Hey Hey I Wanna Be a Rockstar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [An anon and I](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/97989382816/i-sort-of-dont-want-normal-bald-charles-maybe) agreed we have serious qualms about bald!McAvoy but could probably tolerate it as a shaved-head-rockstar kind of thing... i.e. the one where the X-Men and the Brotherhood Evil Mutants are rock bands.

Erik stopped dead in the doorway, staring into the bathroom. “What happened to your head?”

Charles raised an eyebrow at him in the mirror. “Good morning to you, too, Erik. How was the gig?”

"Lousy. People kept throwing bras onstage. What happened to your _head?”_

"I shaved it. Well, most of it. I was just debating whether to leave this last bit or not." He ran his fingers through the single remaining crest of hair down the center of his head, and lifted the razor.

"Stop! Charles, just — _wait,_ will you?” Erik crossed the room and plucked the razor from his hand, then glared down into Charles’s eyes. “Have you slept? Are you back on that stuff again?”

"No, to both." Charles smiled sweetly, rising on his toes to kiss Erik’s cheek — and make a grab for the razor, which Erik easily evaded. Charles rolled his eyes and desisted, turning back to the mirror. "I dunno, I just thought I could… use a change. The X-Men could use a change."

Erik rubbed his eyes wearily. It had never been easy, him and Charles, and being leads for rival rock bands — The X-Men and The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants — was only part of it. “Is this about that award?”

"No! Erik, I’m very happy for you and the Brotherhood. You deserve that award. I just…" He trailed away into a sigh, leaning back against Erik’s shoulder.

Erik wrapped an arm around him, frowning as skin pressed against his cheek instead of hair. “Do you think The X-Men need a new direction?”

"I… No. I believe in our direction. What you and Raven do," and that had long been a sticking point, Charles’s sister leaving his band to join Erik’s, "the aggression, the chaos, it has its place but it’s just not us."

"And this," Erik ran a hand over Charles’s nearly-bare scalp, "this is you?"

"I suppose I just need to find out whether it’s me or not." He turned in Erik’s arms, tilting his head for another kiss, which Erik gladly gave. "It’s probably just sleep deprivation. But it’s not _so_ bad, is it?”

Erik ran the little crest of floppy chestnut silk through his fingers, letting it fall this way, that way. Pictured it gelled into standing straight up. “It certainly will get attention,” he admitted.

"But you hate it," Charles chuckled, twining his arms around Erik’s waist. "I shouldn’t expect anything else, I know how much you love my hair. Don’t worry, darling, it’ll grow back."

"If you want it to," Erik said, making a valiant effort to remember that it was Charles’s head and Charles’s decision. He pressed a lingering kiss to the bare crown of that head, which felt warm and soft and… maybe not terrible. Maybe. "Right now, we both desperately need sleep."

"If you insist," Charles said dreamily, and let Erik drag him off to bed.


	45. In the Name of the Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles fights crime in a sailor suit, directed by a talking cat. He doesn't know what has happened to his life. (Sailor Moon AU. Prompted by dracoangelica [here.](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/100644485301/cherick-sailor-moon-charles-balls-up-his-failed))

It was bad enough that Charles was taking orders from a talking cat, and getting dragged out of his warm and comfortable bed to go fight terrifying demon monsters in the middle of the night. But he also had to do it in a ridiculous sailor suit with tiny shorts and a _bow._

"Are you disrespecting the transformation magic of your ancestors?" Moira yowled, batting at his head from her position atop the bookcase. "Besides, it’s not that different from your school uniform. And Mystique wears a sailor suit, too!"

"That’s true." Charles perked up at the thought of Mystique, his unknown sister-in-arms, the other teenage vigilante Guardian-of-Justice that Moira denied had any connection to himself and his fellow senshi. Charles wasn’t at all sure he believed that; he knew in his bones that someday he would fight alongside Mystique — and the handsome, enigmatic Tuxedo Helmet as well.

"Just transform already," Moira said. "The other boys will beat you there! Some leader you are!"

If Charles had ever imagined having a magical animal advisor — which he hadn’t — he wouldn’t have visualized her being as grouchy and critical as Moira. Charles grumbled under his breath, gave his bed one last longing look, and started the transformation. If he absolutely had to fight monsters tonight, he’d much rather do it as Sailor Moon than as clueless middle-school nerd Charles Xavier.

**

The other boys _did_ beat them there, already waiting at the darkened movie store that was apparently yet another demonic front for soul-draining. _They_ didn’t look utterly ridiculous in the tiny shorts, Charles admitted; in fact they all looked fantastic, but they always did. Tall, awkward Sailor Mercury (also known as Hank McCoy, Class Genius) looked at least as nervous as Charles felt about the situation; somehow that gave him the courage to straighten his spine and lift his chin. If he really was their leader, it was important that Charles put on a good face, and do whatever he could to comfort and support his senshi.

"Are you ever on time for anything?" called Sailor Mars, a.k.a. Alex Summers, who could give Moira irritability lessons any day. Charles couldn’t imagine how Alex conducted his Shinto shrine duties with that kind of attitude; his grandfather had hinted that it involved a lot of locking himself away for solitary meditation.

"Aw, c’mon, Mars, you know the party doesn’t start ‘til he walks in anyway," laughed Sean — that was, Sailor Jupiter — who despite his stormy powers, often functioned as something of a mediator when senshi tempers got high. Though he always seemed cheerful and easygoing, Charles suspected Sean was less emotionally self-sufficient than he pretended. More importantly at the moment, he was excellent to have on hand during a fight.

"If we’re all ready, then," Moira said dryly, "let’s shut this place down before it gets anyone killed!"

**

The fight went well at first; Charles did not at any point end up cowering in a corner, and Hank got to use a new power for the first time. They took out two demons without much trouble.

Then Azazel showed up.

They’d run into one other of his type before, figures who looked more human than the demons and seemed to have control of them; the previous one had called herself Emma, and been run off when Tuxedo Helmet intervened and nearly shattered her (which, how do people shatter, but Charles had already seen so much weirder). Azazel seemed to be stronger and faster than Emma; before Charles knew it, the senshi were all scattered and injured, and the red demonic man had him pinned to a brick wall with a tail around his throat and a sword’s point just below that.

Lack of air clouded all Charles’s senses, but he heard a voice calling his name — calling _Sailor Moon_ at least. It wasn’t Sean, Hank, or Alex, and for a horrible moment Charles thought, bizarrely, that it was Erik Lehnsherr, the smug obnoxious (gorgeous) older boy he kept encountering in embarrassing ways around town.

But of course it wasn’t. Charles caught a glimpse of moonlight on black and silver, the distinctive silhouette of the dashing Tuxedo Helmet, here to rescue him again, just before he lost consciousness.

**

He came to in a warm, comfortable bed, and for a confused moment thought perhaps it had all been a dream. But when he opened his eyes, the room was unfamiliar, and his throat ached, tender and bruised under his fingertips. Cautiously, he sat up.

"You’re awake." The voice came from a figure sitting in shadow in the corner of the room, his tuxedo rumpled; the jacket and bowtie were strewn across the nearby table, next to the silvery helmet.

Charles was in Tuxedo Helmet’s room. His pulse leaped, mouth going dry — and the only thing more ridiculous than the big blue bow on his shirt was his crush on someone he knew nothing about, someone Moira insisted might well be an enemy, but there it was anyway. Charles got out of the bed slowly, trying to unobtrusively finger-comb his hair into some kind of order, and stepped closer.

Tuxedo Helmet stood, and stepped into the light.

And was suddenly Erik Lehnsherr.

Charles stared for several seconds, trying to get the sight to make sense. Really, once he thought about them in the same context, the two faces — the one he’d gazed into on a starlit balcony after a dance, and the one that had smirked at ketchup on Charles’s nose and scolded him for dropped homework — were easily identifiable as the same. Charles felt as if the floor had tipped under his feet; he stumbled a bit as he reached for the helmet on the table, and slowly raised it to Erik’s head. Erik bent his neck to let him slide it on.

"Erik," Charles said breathlessly. "The helmet changes your face, the shape of it, your mouth — but I should have known you."

"How could you," Erik said wryly, pulling the helmet off again, "when I only recently figured it out myself?"

Which was how Charles first learned of Erik’s amnesia, the persistent memory blackouts, the flashbacks and dreams — his need to find the enchanted crystal that might help him solve the riddle of himself. That was how Charles first came to reach for Erik’s hand, call him _my friend,_ and promise him they wanted the same thing.


	46. Peace and Order

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by [this](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/109417001461/the-day-charles-first-met-alexander-pierce-he-was) photo of James McAvoy posing with Robert Redford.

The day Charles first met Alexander Pierce, he was still adjusting to the loss of his telepathy to Hank’s serum. Something struck him as off about the man, something calculating and insincere, but interpreting body language was hardly his strongest suit. He brushed it off.

The second time Charles met Alexander Pierce, he remembered that sense of “off-ness” and, though he would not usually invade a near-stranger’s mind, he skimmed at least the first layer or two, just to set his own mind at ease. He was surprised and pleased to find that Pierce was just what he seemed, that he did truly have peace and order for all at the forefront of all he did. Secrets of some sort lurked beneath, of course, but Charles knew — none better — that everyone had secrets, sometimes all the more for desiring to do no harm. He looked no deeper, seeing no need to invade.

He would remember that, much later, the next time Magneto accused him of sacrificing rightful power for useless courtesy, and for once have no rebuttal.


	47. Questions & Answers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What does either of them really want?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By anonymous prompt [here.](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/112382997691/cherik-16)

“Is this what you want?” Charles whispered, their lips brushing together in a dark hotel room.

“Yes,” Erik answered, “yes, yes, yes.”

*

“We want the same thing,” Erik said, Charles heavy in his arms on a too-bright beach.

“Oh, my friend, I’m sorry,” Charles answered, “but we do not.”

*

“This was never what I wanted,” Erik whispered, the flame of Charles’s memorial fluttering in the darkness.

There was no answer at all.


	48. Resuscitation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What mattered was that Charles wasn't breathing. (Alternate outcome of the Days of Future Past scene where Erik tries to shoot Raven.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompted by Jeriais [on Tumblr.](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/112386452836/cherik-10)

Tasers weren’t supposed to be lethal weapons, that was the _point_ of them. But Erik didn’t imagine they’d been tested on mutants – or maybe it was just bad luck, some fluke or unsuspected heart condition. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Charles wasn’t breathing.

Erik had had all sorts of grim-but-necessary plans when they walked into this room. The greater good. The future of the mutant race. None of it mattered. What mattered was that Charles wasn’t breathing.

Raven, at whom the taser had been aimed before Charles stepped in front of her, was screaming something but Erik couldn’t seem to hear past the peculiar roar in his ears.

“Get her out of here,” Erik snapped at Hank, “you know how important it is that she not be here.” He turned to Logan, but the alleged man from the future had collapsed; there was no time to deal with that.

Hank gathered a thrashing, protesting Raven into his arms and leaped from the window. Erik eliminated all other threats in the room with a quick sweep of his powers, taking care to leave Trask alive because the present was disastrous enough, they didn’t need the future to be as well. Then finally he could turn all his focus to Charles.

Whatever the dime romance paperbacks might say, giving CPR was nothing at all like kissing. Erik would know – would give anything at all to have that familiar mouth pushing back against his, feel Charles’s breath on his lips. Instead, for long, long minutes, there was only slack, empty, motionless nothing.

Erik thought his own heart would stop when Charles’s mouth finally moved, coughed, gasped – pulled away from Erik, seeking air.

“What happened? Where’s Raven?” Charles asked, looking around wildly.

“Safe,” Erik said, hoping he was right, hoping he could let her stay that way.

“We need to clear out,” Logan growled from behind them, where Erik belatedly realized he was holding off the armed men who were trying to get into the room.

“What _happened?”_ Charles demanded again, lunging unsteadily to his feet and clutching at Erik for balance.

"You stopped breathing.” The words fell harsh from his mouth, carrying traces of the horror and panic still echoing inside him. Charles stared at him.

“Out the window,” Logan snapped, “let’s _go.”_

Erik pulled Charles to the window and out, wrapping his power around both of them to turn the fall into a smooth glide. Charles gasped and pressed close to him, reflexively; Erik pulled him closer still.

Just before their feet touched the ground, Erik pressed their mouths together again – couldn’t not, had to erase the sense-memory of lifeless unresponsive lips against his.

Caught off guard, Charles arched hungrily into the kiss for one second, two – then there were other things happening, bullets flying and humans shouting, Logan landing lightly beside them and lashing out with bony claws. Erik turned his attention to the matters at hand, but to some deep and bright-pulsing part inside him, none of it mattered. What mattered was that Charles was breathing again.


	49. Always the Romantic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Prompted by [jabletown](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/119336730671/police-or-covert-psuedo-government-agency-raid).) A police raid interrupts Charles and Erik's romantic dinner.

Everything was perfect. They had candlelight, Erik had found a bottle of Charles’s favorite wine, the filet mignon had turned out flawlessly—Erik had even scattered a few rose petals across the table, and the sight of them made Charles’s mouth turn up at one corner, his expression softening.

“Always the romantic,” he murmured, letting Erik push his wheelchair in close to the table.

“Always.” Encouraged, Erik dared to duck in for a kiss to Charles’s cheek.

And then the klaxons started sounding.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Erik shouted over the racket, as if anyone might expect to have their dinner interrupted by flashing red lights and screaming alarms. “The others can handle it.” They had _better,_ he thought darkly, and sent a loud mental AHEM toward Emma Frost.

Her reply was immediate and extremely unwelcome.

“They’ll handle it,” Erik said again, reaching for his fork.

“Erik, I heard her too, and ‘evacuate immediately’ doesn’t sound to me like the situation’s being handled—”

“My people can deal with one little police raid.”

“I’d just as soon they didn’t, if ‘dealing with it’ is going to result in a body count. Perhaps we’d better go.”

Erik glared at him, slashing a hand through the air so that most of the nearby alarms went silent with a shower of sparks. “This is probably your fault, you know.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“This raid. They’re probably looking for you.”

Charles just sat with his mouth open for a moment, looking so utterly exasperated that it almost circled back around to being actually charmed. “I’m sorry, you’re saying it’s _my fault_ that the police are here after _you kidnapped me?”_

“Kidnapped,” Erik snorted. “You clearly wanted to come.”

“As evidenced by my repeated shouts of ‘put me down’?!”

“No helmet,” Erik grinned. “You could have _made_ me put you down.”

“I try not to override others’ free wills unless absolutely necessary,” Charles said primly, which was a blatant lie, Erik had seen him override others’ free wills just to get his drink served faster. “Anyway this can’t be about me, my students would just come themselves, not send innocent police officers in to get tangled up with you. I imagine it’s possible you’ve been up to something else illegal recently, hm?”

“It’s possible,” Erik grunted, wondering who talked and how quickly he could track them down and disembowel them.

_Are you aware that immediately means soon?_ came Emma’s furious voice inside his head. _They’re coming your way and I’m not bothering to stop them, you’re a big enough boy to take care of yourself._

Footsteps pounded down the corridor toward their door.

Charles rolled his eyes. “I’ll slow them down. You go on out the back.”

The candles on the table shook as the police pounded on the door. Erik looked at their untouched meal in heartbreak and dismay.

“Take your plate, leave me the wine,” Charles said, and there was no denying he was smiling now. “I would never let your cooking go to waste, love. Do go on, though, before you get yourself into trouble.”

Erik sighed, folded a metal wall-sconce into a cover for the plate and made for the door—turning back at the last moment to lean down and give Charles as heated a kiss as he could manage on the run.

“Mmm,” Charles said appreciatively. “Give my love to Raven, won’t you, it’s a shame I didn’t get to see her this trip.”

“Next time,” Erik said with a crooked smile, lips brushing his. Across the room, the door splintered open.

“Next time,” Charles whispered, and turned toward the invading police with a hand at his temple, while Erik dashed out the back door.


	50. (Not) Here For the Party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles would normally rather join the loud crazy party than shut it down, but if the morons downstairs didn’t knock it off with the karaoke he was going to melt their brains out their noses. (Prompted by [sapphire--queen](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/101467114421/are-you-still-doing-prompts-d-mmm-how-about).)

Charles was normally the neighbor that would rather join the loud crazy party than shut it down — in fact, he was frequently the one throwing it. This week, though. This week he’d had four grueling exams, and the due dates of three term papers. It was 2 a.m., he’d been awake for almost 72 hours, and if the morons downstairs didn’t knock it off with the karaoke he was going to melt their brains out their noses. Or at least give them “It’s a Small World” as an earworm for the next six weeks.

For a moment he considered intervening telepathically, pinpointing the host of the party and shouting inside his head until he quieted things down. Alas, that would almost certainly do more harm than good, and maybe get him reported for Unethical Use of Telepathy again. If he went in person, however… well, he wasn’t above playing the Be Nice To The Man In The Wheelchair card to get what he wanted.

By the time he got himself, chair and all, down one floor to the proper apartment, it was 2:30 a.m. Bass shook in his sternum and his head throbbed with the beat — and with the rolling, sloshing, spinning ocean of thoughts and emotions inside, threatening to shred his overworked shields.

He pounded on the door, but there was no way anyone would hear it. Grumbling under his breath, Charles grabbed the nearest mind that wasn’t entirely painful to touch and yanked at its attention.

The young man who opened the door was so distractingly attractive that Charles couldn’t speak for a full ten seconds. Tall and lean and angular, with broad shoulders and close-cropped hair, wearing only an undershirt and… pajama pants?

“You live upstairs, right?” he shouted over the noise. “If you want to call the cops, I’ll lend you my phone.”

Not exactly what Charles had expected to hear. He gaped.

The man shook his head and eased past the wheelchair far enough to close the door behind him, which helped with the noise level… a little.

“I’m Erik,” he shouted, “I live here, but—”

 _We can talk this way if it’s easier_ , Charles said, raising a hand to his temple.

Erik started, but then grinned.  _Mutant, huh? Me, too._ A small knife and some coins rose from his pockets to circle his hand briefly.

Charles craned his head forward, a smile washing away the last of his irritation.  _Telekinesis? That’s fantastic!_

 _Magnetism,_ Erik corrected.  _Anyway the party is my roommate’s doing, and considering what else is going on in there, I don’t want to be here when the cops break it up. I just want some **sleep**._

_ME TOO._

_There’s a Motel 6 just down the road,_ Erik said thoughtfully.  _We could split the cost of a room…?_

Charles grinned.  _I like that idea._

*

It was nearly noon before Charles woke, disoriented for a moment by the large, soft bed, the unfamiliar curtains, and most of all, the warm body next to his.

Erik. Motel 6.

The only available room had had one king-size bed instead of the usual two singles; Charles remembered laughing sleepily as Erik lifted his wheelchair with magnetism and poured him onto the mattress. That was pretty much  _all_ he remembered. But he was under the covers now, with Erik curled up comfortably beside him. Even as Charles debated whether to get up yet, Erik’s brow wrinkled and he shifted closer, throwing an arm over Charles’s waist.

Charles couldn’t suppress a chuckle; Erik’s eyes flew open, and he recoiled — horrified at himself, Charles was relieved to note, not at Charles’s proximity.

“You know, I normally take people to dinner  _before_ sleeping with them,” Charles said. “But in this case I’d be happy to make an exception and go the other way round.”

"Uh…” Concern swirled behind Erik’s sleep-fog.

 _No, nothing happened that you don’t remember,_ Charles assured him, grinning.  _Just my rubbish attempt to flirt, I’m afraid. Is that a yes, then, to dinner?_

 _I usually start with coffee,_ Erik replied, giving him a half-smile.  _Less pressure._

_Coffee it is, then. Now?_

_Later._ Erik punctuated the thought with a deep yawn.  _Unless **you’re** ready to get up…_

 _Heavens, no._ Charles yawned back, and wriggled in close to Erik’s chest.  _Try me again at sundown._

 _Sweet dreams, Charles._ Erik chuckled and wrapped his arms more securely around him, and they both went back to sleep.


	51. More to Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Chubby Charles not!fic.](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/103616100311/can-you-talk-about-chubby-charles-pls-i-need-a)

**Anonymous asked: can you talk about chubby charles pls i need a pick-me-up**

Oh, talk about chubby Charles? Like talk about Charles as someone who’s always had to fight a little with his weight, y’know, just make a point to stay active and take it easy on the desserts? And that was enough when he was young and able-bodied but after his injury the whole “staying active” thing is harder, and when he’s running a school it’s harder still because he’s just SO BUSY ALL THE TIME, he ends up eating whatever’s handy and exercise just doesn’t make it to the top of the to-do list very often.

And Erik doesn’t care, he really doesn’t. He teases him about it — pinches a love handle, calls him a cream puff — and it might sting, however gentle the joke, except that Charles knows for a fact that Erik doesn’t mind at all. That he thinks of his people starved to matchsticks in Auschwitz and can only feel gratitude that Charles has enough to eat, enough to get fat on. That really it gives him a deep satisfaction to see Charles enjoying his second slice of cake so much he’s nearly moaning with it.

It might become a hackneyed, almost mocking phrase later in history, but Erik really does think of it as having more of Charles to love; a cute round tummy to squeeze, soft sweet cheeks to nibble. It’s all fine with Erik.

It’s harder for Charles to resign himself to being a well-rounded individual, but what helps more than anything is the day a young student, too little to fully grasp the concept of manners, comes to him crying, and curls up in his lap.

“I like your big tummy,” he says, voice muffled in a sweater that’s getting too small. “It’s easy to hug.”

“You know what,” Charles says, “you’re right,” and hugs him back.

 

**braginskass asked: oh my god please more chubby charles(if you're up for it) that was a r t**

WELL I suppose I could talk about Charles trying to exercise and lose some weight but he hardly ever manages to finish a workout, because as soon as he gets all flushed and sweaty Erik carries him off to the bedroom. (To be fair, they certainly do burn calories there.)

And the way Erik snuggles up to him in bed afterward, wrapped around his pillowy body, the way he just relaxes against him with this sigh of deep and satisfying relief, as if Charles is the first thing he’s trusted to remain soft and comfortable when touched.

I could talk about chocolate chess pieces and Erik losing on purpose because it’s so much fun to watch Charles eat them.

I could talk about how, when Charles actually does get heavy enough that he’s really bothered by his own body and wants to change it, Erik loves him enough to support his efforts, instead of sabotaging him for his own preferences.

And how they reach a weight level that they’re both pleased with, what Charles calls “comfortably upholstered,” and Charles experiments with growing a beard to cover the double chin, which Erik unexpectedly likes.

And how, especially after the beard, the students call them Professor Teddy Bear and Professor Grizzly Bear and give them cute bears-in-love-themed figurines and cards. Erik thinks it’s ridiculous but Charles keeps the whole collection. And they live happily (and roundly) ever after.


	52. Misfortune

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bad luck, or fate?
> 
> Prompted on tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/112447478296/cherik-and-13-please).

Bad luck, that’s all it was. Bad luck that his body and the deflected bullet managed to occupy the same space at the same moment. There was no malice aforethought; no one intended it to happen. It was just… misadventure. Misfortune. Bad luck.

It wasn’t fair to hold it against Erik, he knew that even at the height of his bitter furious determination to do so anyway. Later years brought apologies, attempts at amends, telepathic proof of regret; the grudge proved impossible to hold. It was just bad luck.

But there was another word, Charles thought faintly, as he looked through the dizzying array of alternate realities the child showed him – frightened and bewildered by her own uncontrolled power, but he would help her with that. There was another word for misfortune. _Disaster._ Literally “bad star,” a reflection of the old idea that fate was written in the stars, inevitable, immutable.

Fifty-six alternate realities lay before him, each as real as his own, only taking place in some cosmic elsewhere. In some he walked, thanks to some variation on Hank’s serum, or other medical marvels. In the ones where he had left the beach unscathed (surprisingly few), there were other things – enemies who crushed his legs under tons of rock, another beach where an older, madder Erik threw a spear – there were even worlds where he lost his mobility as a child, as if in trade for his manifesting powers.

In only two of the fifty-six had he never been paralyzed – the one where he died in a laboratory fire as a teenager, and one where, for complex reasons, his cynicism and rage at humanity outstripped even Erik’s, and the two of them briefly ruled a decimated Earth before being killed by a group of Charles’s students who still had consciences.

Disaster. Fate written in the stars. _I’ll take it,_ Charles thought, hands shaking as he gently closed the array of universes, ushered the relieved child’s power away into a box they could unlock later, together. He made a mental note to give Erik a call.


	53. 67%

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> According to [this article](http://www.yourtango.com/2014223865/why-67-married-women-want-cheat), 67% of married women want the excitement of an affair, even though they love their husbands. Charles doesn't want he and Erik's marriage to be a statistic.
> 
> On Tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/112488753201/i-dont-know-why-but-for-some-reason-that-posts).

The sample for the survey was absurdly small and biased, of course. All the same, the idea that 67% of _any_ group of women wanted to cheat on their husbands was arresting. They didn’t want divorce, they just wanted the excitement of an affair – wanted passion and romance, wanted to be wined and dined and _courted_ again.

Charles looked at the calendar, where he and Erik’s tenth anniversary was circled some three weeks in the future. Last year, the anniversary ‘celebration’ had been cheeseburgers in the car on the way to Pietro’s baseball game. They hadn’t even discussed what they might do this year. In fact, it had been a while since they really discussed anything. Argued, certainly – but even that was hurried and terse, a few words in passing as they juggled careers and school events and doctor’s appointments…

Charles didn’t want an affair. He wanted passion and romance and courtship with _Erik._

“Lorna, dear,” he called, already grabbing keys from the counter and pushing his chair toward the door, “take over with that pot of pasta, just follow the directions on the box. And remind Wanda to do her spelling homework when she gets out of the bath.”

“Um, okay, sure? Where are you going, Dad?”

“To pick up Vati. I might be a while.”

Erik had taken to spending 30 minutes or so at a particular bar on the way home from work. They’d argued about it a bit, but Erik said he did better with a few minutes to unwind between the office and home. It usually meant he usually came through the door just in time for dinner and didn’t have to help with any of the mess and chaos that came before it, but it was true that he wasn’t nearly as snappish and tense under those circumstances, which was nice for everyone involved.

Wives – and perhaps also husbands – wanted to be courted and appreciated, Charles told himself again. They wanted to be part of a love story as well as a household.

The bar was at forehead level to Charles in his chair, an unexpected obstacle, but Erik was fortunately sitting at the very end, where part of the bar lowered and became wheelchair-height. Erik sometimes had even stronger feelings about accessibility than Charles himself, and Charles was weirdly warmed by the thought that he’d chosen to give a wheelchair-accessible bar his business even when deliberately avoiding his family.

“Hello there,” Charles purred, pouring it on just as thick as he ever had in his undergrad days. “I couldn’t help noticing what beautiful hands you have. The ring is a shame, but I’m willing to overlook that if you are.”

Erik choked very gratifyingly on his drink and did an actual double-take, possibly the first one Charles had ever seen in real life. For a moment he just stared at Charles, not speaking.

“Ah, the strong and silent type,” Charles said. “I love that. It’s all the more rewarding when you do finally… make a sound.”

The first hint of a smile curved the edges of Erik’s lips. He turned back to his drink, taking a very deliberate sip that showed off the elegance of his profile. “Is this the sort of line that usually works for you?”

“Well, I’ll be honest, this isn’t the sort of thing I usually do. But I saw you sitting here, looking so beautiful and solitary, and I thought… there is someone who deserves an effort. There is a work of art that needs to be appreciated.” He ran a finger lightly down Erik’s arm, and was pleasantly surprised when Erik shivered.

“I’m a married man,” Erik said.

“And I’d never dream of interfering with that.” Charles widened his eyes, letting them fill with innocent sincerity. “But doesn’t everyone need a little… something special now and then?”

Erik set down his drink, looking at Charles like he was the best surprise he’d ever gotten, a look Charles realized he had missed terribly. “Your place, then?”

Charles thought quickly. “Of course. I have a lovely little flat just a few blocks from here. I hope you don’t mind dogs?”

Erik, who knew full well that they’d _have_ to go to Raven’s flat sometime in the evening to feed and walk her dogs while she was out of town, grinned broadly. “Lead the way, lover. But not a word to my husband.”

“Not a word,” Charles promised, and lifted Erik’s hand for a kiss.


	54. Multitasking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scott really hates these meetings with the Brotherhood.
> 
> On Tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/112662647321/cherik-64-please).

In the last few years, this sort of meeting had grown more common – the X-Men and the Brotherhood planning missions together. Scott didn’tlike it, probably never would, but necessity, the enemy of my enemy, etc.

The Professor swept a fingertip across the map of the facility they would be raiding, pointing out defensive weaknesses. “If we send one team north to the—to the asgg d-dlipa—” Everyone stared as he sputtered for a moment, swallowed hard… then continued as if nothing had happened.

He did the same thing a few minutes later, and Scott realized Magneto alone did not appear confused. In fact, he ran a hand through his surprisingly well-styled, helmet-free hair and smiled, looking smug.

The Professor, Scott realized with horror, was _blushing._ Beside him, Jean looked at Scott’s face and tried to stifle a giggle.

“Something wrong, Charles?” Magneto asked smoothly.

The Professor glared at him.

“Too much on your mind, perhaps,” Magneto suggested.

The Professor just smiled, somehow sly and serene at the same time. “I think you’ll find I’m capable of thinking about a great many things at once, Erik. Now, to the south we have the electric fence…” He rubbed absently at the metal control-stick of his wheelchair – and now it was Magneto’s face that turned red. Well… redder, from Scott’s point of view.

Working with the Brotherhood would never be Scott’s favorite thing. But he really, _really_ hated these meetings.


	55. Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for a prompt on tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/112662798531/hey-love-your-work-d-hows-about-32-night).

Daylight was a dangerous thing. When daylight came, he would be Professor Xavier again, with principles to uphold and students who dependedon him. The man beside him would be Magneto, with vicious battles to fight and a signature item of apparel expressly devoted to keeping Charles out of his affairs.

But right now the sky was dark, the minds around them muted with sleep, and Charles would not allow either of them to think about daylight. Instead he pulled Erik down to him in the bed, tangling both hands in his hair, and let himself be desperately in love


	56. The Secret

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "keeping a secret," on tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/112748346361/charles-erik-53). A/O universe. See end note for (spoilery) warning.

“I didn’t mean to keep it a secret, exactly,” Charles said, looking fixedly at the chess piece he had dropped, turning it over in his hands. It had broken into two pieces, rattling as they moved. “But we… weren’t speaking. It seemed cruel and pointless to seek you out just to tell you… and what was there to tell? It was gone. I never even knew about it until it was gone.”

The chess piece was a knight, Erik saw, aged ivory fragile in Charles’s restless fingers. He wanted to dash it out of Charles’s hands, demand that Charles look him in the eye.

“You said you couldn’t get pregnant,” he said instead.

“Yes, well, that’s certainly what I’d been told.” Charles’s laugh was bitter, his hand clenching around the broken knight. “I suppose my childhood doctor would call it a miracle.”

Their miracle. And Erik had killed it, along with everything else that might have been between himself and Charles, when he deflected a bullet without bothering to look where it went.

After a long silence, Charles finally lifted his gaze to Erik’s. “Are you angry?” The question meant he was too afraid to check Erik’s mind for himself.

Of course Erik was angry. But not at Charles. At himself, for being so careless – over and over, careless. He should have insisted on using protection. He should never have gone to bed with Charles at all, should never have thought they could casually enjoy Charles’s heat together without getting attached. That had been the most mistaken assumption of his entire life.

Seeming to take Erik’s silence as an affirmative, Charles gave a wistful, broken sort of smile, and looked away to set the pieces of the knight on the table.

There was a moment slipping away from him right now, Erik could feel it. An opportunity for – reparation, redemption, _something._ He didn’t know what words would let him take it.

He reached for the chess piece instead, summoned a paperclip from the nearby desk, and for several minutes bent his entire attention to reforming it, sliding tendrils of metal into and around the knight, until it was held together again, messy but whole.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, pressing it into Charles’s hand. “For everything. I’m sorry you were alone.” Grieving alone, with no one at all to share the burden, would surely have been the worst part.

He had not released Charles’s hand. He raised it now to his lips, holding Charles’s gaze, willing him to hear the words he didn’t know how to say. That he didn’t have to be alone now.

Charles, eyes lighting with some cautious, long-forgotten hope, brushed his hand along Erik’s jawline, and pulled him forward into a kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: miscarriage


	57. Through the Fire (Top Gun AU, Pt I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt phrase "through the fire" -- Every time I tried to look at it, all I could hear was “Through the Fire” by Larry Greene from the Top Gun soundtrack. So uh. Charles/Erik 1980s fighter pilots AU. ([Listen to the song with some movie footage here!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUhtTA_3Et4))
> 
> (Originally posted on tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/112845937381/cherik-on-64-or-89-please))

Everyone knew that Erik Lehnsherr, call-sign Magneto, was a brilliant aviator, flying a Tomcat as if the metal frame of the aircraft were part of his own body. Everyone also knew that he’d have been dead years ago, either from one of his insane flying stunts or the bar-room brawls he picked with such shark-toothed glee, if it weren’t for the steadying influence of his RIO, Charles Xavier, call-sign The Prof.

(What the two of them were besides best friends, nobody asked and nobody told.)

They only got into Top Gun training by tragic accident; the team that should have gone crashed during a training exercise. Darwin was killed and Havok couldn’t bear to even look at a plane anymore. Magneto and The Prof were as upset as anybody, but they brushed it off when people said it was bad luck to take Darwin’s slot. Superstitious nonsense.

Nobody knew yet that the F-14A Tomcat sometimes had problems ejecting the RIO seat. They found out, when Magneto’s plane went into a flat spin during a dogfight, and ejecting was the only way to survive.

The Prof was luckier than some Tomcat RIOs. His neck didn’t – entirely – snap. But after hours in the water without medical attention, Erik desperately holding him up so he didn’t drown, the damage to his spinal cord was irreparable. He might get out of the hospital someday, but he’d never come back to the Navy.

Everyone wondered if Magneto would pull a Havok and drop out. It looked likely for a while. Eventually he got back in the saddle, though. Got a new RIO, call-sign Mystique. Didn’t much talk about The Prof anymore.

But he was never quite right after that, and everybody knew why.


	58. As if each moment was the only one (Top Gun AU, Pt II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for Ikeracity, who wanted to know more about what happened in the water. Title is from a line from "Through the Fire." Originally on tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/112853168556/just-the-idea-of-erik-desperately-keeping-charles).

After the first rush of complete panic, they both got quiet. Then Charles made a joke about premature ejection. He told increasingly lame jokes for quite a while, and Erik supposedly laughed at them but it didn’t sound like laughter. Then it started getting dark, the temperature plummeting, the gentle rolling water around them looking less friendly by the minute. Charles ran out of jokes. Somehow they started talking about Erik’s mother, and Charles’s stepfather, until Charles said he didn’t want to talk about that anymore.

They were quiet again for a while, and Erik kept trying to think of things to say because the silence terrified him. But the only thing he could think was _I love you,_ which was something he’d never managed to say, and he tried, he tried but he couldn’t say it now either. He couldn’t shake the conviction that if he did, it would be the last thing he ever said to Charles.

“I love you,” Charles said in the darkness, the words hitting Erik like a blow to the gut.

“Don’t,” he snapped. “Charles. Stop it.”

“It’s all right, Erik,” Charles said, gentle and soothing, peaceful. “You’ll be all right.”

“We both will, as soon as the rescue team finishes its coffee break and comes to fish us out.”

Now it was Charles’s laughter that didn’t sound like laughter. “I know. Kiss me?”

Erik felt that same urgent need to avoid anything that smacked of farewell — superstitious nonsense — _they were right, they were right, we shouldn’t have taken Darwin’s slot_ — but he couldn’t deny Charles, he never could and certainly not now. Slowly and carefully, the angle unavoidably awkward, he kissed him, very softly but for a long time. Charles’s lips were cold.

“Tell me about Germany,” Charles whispered afterward. They had talked about going there, maybe next summer. Erik told him everything he remembered from his childhood, talked himself hoarse. Talked and talked long after Charles lost consciousness, terrified to stop.

Charles didn’t wake when the rescue helicopters finally found them, not when Erik strapped him into the harness to be pulled up, not when the medic swore in four languages as he immobilized his neck and layered him in blankets. But he was still breathing, and when Erik heard that he curled up in a ball and cried until the panicked medic sedated him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Due to the unremitting angst of this AU, I want to add that even though Erik flies with Mystique now, he and Charles are still together. It's hard, but they're making it. They're both too stubborn to give up.


	59. Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Steve/Bucky chapter, prompted on tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/113218107951/stucky-17).

Bucky wouldn’t talk about what they’d done to him, on that table where Steve had found him reciting his name, rank and serial number. Steve could only guess from the consequences that showed during the long and chaotic march back to Allied territory. Bucky was pale and thin, more so even than men with worse physical injuries. He always looked exhausted, yet he never seemed to sleep; any time Steve woke in the night, he found Bucky staring away into the darkness with eyes too big for his starved face. Steve pressed food on him, every scrap he could get, and he knew Bucky was trying… but very little of what he choked down seemed to stay there.

Bucky pressed on, though. Every day Steve expected him to collapse, but he always managed to stay on his feet somehow. He never mentioned the hunger and exhaustion and sickness that were so self-evident; his only complaint—loud and angry and profane, sounding almost like himself—was that he was cold, _freezing cold_ all the time. The men were happy to volunteer anything they had, anything for Sarge, and Bucky spent the days bundled in coats, hats, gloves, sometimes shivering even in full daylight.

Nights he spent in one of the three tents they’d scavenged on their way out of the HYDRA facility, reserved for the weakest and sickest among them. Steve stayed there with him, feeling guilty about it, the way it looked—but not guilty enough to leave Bucky alone. Buck didn’t say anything about it, but lying down with Steve in the next bedroll seemed to be the only thing that made him stop shivering for a while.

-

The fourth night of the march, Steve woke to the sound of Bucky shifting around in his bedroll, breath heavy and pained.

“Buck?” he called—quietly, not wanting to wake anyone else in the tent.

Bucky froze, with his face turned away. “‘M fine, Steve. Go back to sleep.”

“I can tell something’s wrong,” Steve said miserably. “I wish you’d talk to me.”

“It’s nothing,” Bucky said, sounding just as wretched as Steve felt. “I’m just…” A bitter laugh escaped him, almost sheepish. “Hungry. I’m so hungry, Steve, you can’t imagine…”

"Of course you’re hungry. I don’t think you even tried to eat today. Look, I’ve got something for you.” He left his bedroll to find his bag over by the canvas wall, dug around in a pocket. “Candy bar. It’s even got almonds. Come on, I know you can eat some of that.”

Bucky rolled over, looking torn.

Heartened by even this tentative sign of interest, Steve starting unwrapping the candy bar. The stiff foil rustled loudly in the dark tent, and one of the other men stirred; Steve winced. Thinking it might be quieter, he set his teeth to the foil instead—and gasped as the edge cut his lip.

“Steve?” Bucky rose from his bed in a single, oddly fluid motion, his eyes huge and dark in the dim light.

“I’m fine,” Steve said, exasperated at himself. His fingertip came away from his lip shiny with blood. “Smallest klutz in Brooklyn, you used to say—might be the biggest, now.”

“You’re bleeding,” Bucky said hoarsely, from only inches away, and Steve stepped back in surprise. When had he gotten that close?

“Just a papercut, Bucky. Look, you said you were hungry, let’s—”

Bucky grabbed Steve’s head in both hands and crushed their mouths together.

Steve’s brain was stunned, dead in the water, but his body was already reacting—lips parting, hands dropping the candy bar to slide onto Bucky’s hips. _Well how about that,_ was the closest he could come to a coherent thought, because this was something he had not allowed himself to want, something he had never once dreamed of _Bucky_ wanting…

Bucky groaned, pressing closer, harder, nearly knocking Steve over, and something was _wrong._ “Buck,” Steve gasped, trying to pull away. “Bucky, wait, what are you—”

“Haven’t you figured it out yet, Stevie?” Bucky had pulled back an inch or two; even that distance seemed to be a struggle, his face twisted with effort and what might have been disgust or self-loathing. “What they did to me, what they made me into? Oh, God, yours is so much better than what they gave me—” He lost the battle to stay back, and Steve let himself be pushed up against the central pole of the tent and pinned there, trying to hold them both steady while Bucky pulled and worried at Steve’s lower lip. The one, Steve realized with a feeling like winter descending through his spine, that was bleeding.

_It doesn’t matter,_ Steve thought as he wound his arms tighter around Bucky, who was nipping at his lips now, drawing fresher blood. That stung, but it would heal, and Steve let himself relax into the kiss, pain and all. This was Bucky, and anything Steve had was his for the taking. He’d spill anyone’s blood for Bucky any day of the week.

Even his own.


	60. Untimely

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "I sold my soul to bring you back to life after your untimely death and I only have a month left with you so I’m trying to make it count."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not!fic pulled together from two tumblr posts, [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/115847009231/the-angst-prompts-that-no-one-wanted) and [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/116002097961/please-write-that-first-angst-prompt-you-cannot).

Okay but imagine Charles trying desperately to change Erik’s mind about humanity and his own methods before Charles dies and Erik’s left with no counterweight, no opposition – and Erik doesn’t know, doesn’t understand why Charles brought him back just to keep fighting with him more viciously than ever, keeps pulling away…

I can keep going. I can tell you about Erik knowing Charles saved his life but having very little understanding of what actually happened, of the fact that he _died._ I can tell you about the first week he was back, when he and Charles didn’t fight at all, when every other minute it seemed like Charles was just staring at him in wonder and joy. It was like the honeymoon they never got to have and Erik didn’t question it too deeply, even though on some level he knew something was wrong, knew it by the way Charles clung to him at night, tears on his cheeks when he thought Erik was sleeping.

I can tell you about how, when the fighting started up again, it was different, more urgent, more strident – more condescending, in a peculiar way, Charles using his Teacher Voice as if determined to educate Erik once and for all. And how, twenty days after his resurrection, Erik told Charles maybe they should take a break, Charles could go back to the school for a few weeks, Erik swore up and down he’d join him there – he thought that would make Charles happy but instead he went pale and insisted that wasn’t necessary, begging really, as if Erik were throwing him out in the street, or telling him never to come back. It scared him.

I can tell you about the night, a week later, that he was late coming back to the cottage they’d been renting for Erik’s “convalescence” because he got caught up in sorting out some Brotherhood problems, and Charles was angrier than he’d ever seen him, with dinner cold on the table and candles burned out. He realized Charles had cooked, which he never did, and he truly felt bad, tried to apologize and promise better for next time. Charles only shook his head, all his fury draining away, and said there wouldn’t be a next time. He’d never cook for Erik again.

And night #29, just shy of a month after Erik’s near-death experience, when Charles shoved him down on the bed, more aggressive than he’d been in a long time, biting and pinning and desperate, and then achingly tender afterward, holding Erik like something fragile, tracing kisses and fingertips over his face as if trying to memorize it. He should have known then, Erik thought later, so many times. He should have at least suspected. He didn’t. Not even when the last words he heard, as he drifted off to sleep, were _“Oh, Erik, forgive me.”_

He woke in the morning with Charles’s cold arms still around him.


	61. Delicate Skin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bit of sexy fluff as a gift to [Luninosity](archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity). Originally on tumblr [here](http://turtletotem.tumblr.com/post/116786845741/delicate-skin).

Possibly, Charles thought as his spine arched lazily off the bed, he was a little drunk, to be thinking this deeply about wrists. But they deserved thinking about. They were important.

“Of course they are,” Erik said indulgently, nibbling his way along Charles’s collarbone, and Charles wondered whether it was his mouth or his telepathy that he’d lost control of, since he hadn’t meant to say that aloud. But mostly he wondered whether it was evolutionary error or inevitability that led to the sweet sensitivity of the wrist, the thin delicate skin providing so little protection to the hot vital lifeblood there.

“So elegant,” Charles murmured, hearing himself talk this time but giddily unable to stop it. “The entire human body, of course—but wrists, so delicate, so beautiful, and yours…” He reached for Erik’s hand, pulling it away from his own hip to examine it closely, lace their fingers gently together, and press his lips to Erik’s wrist, once, again, again. “It’s trust, I know that,” he whispered earnestly, looking into Erik’s eyes, where he’d stopped what he was doing to watch Charles. “I could hurt you, anyone could, right here… Thank you for that.”

Erik’s eyebrows were quirked with something akin to amusement, but his smile was all helpless adoration. “I always try to give as good as I get.”

True in so many ways, but that observation was crowded out by a rush of delighted tingles as Erik pressed Charles’s arms down above his head. Charles arched up again with a soft moan as he felt Erik’s fingers tighten like shackles around his wrists.

Erik kissed his way urgently up Charles’s throat to his mouth, and against his lips murmured, “You have the most beautiful wrists I’ve ever seen.”

Charles, who knew what he really meant, pulled against Erik’s restraining hands just to feel them press down harder, and grinned as he tipped his head up for another kiss.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Photographer (Photography Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11389917) by [JackyJango](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackyJango/pseuds/JackyJango)




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